How Microsoft is Looking To MetaOS To Make Microsoft 365 a 'Whole Life' Experience (zdnet.com) 31
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, some leaks about Microsoft's "MetaOS" had a lot of us Microsoft watchers scrambling to figure out what this foundational layer is and how it will affect Microsoft's various products and services in the future. Recently, I've unearthed some more details about the company's high-level goals and lower-level product plans around MetaOS. MetaOS has a lot to do with what's next for Microsoft Teams, Office, Edge, and more. I don't know when or if Microsoft will ever talk about MetaOS publicly, but MetaOS and the related Taos team, headed by Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Vice President of the Experiences and Devices Group Kirk Koenigsbauer, is working actively on the MetaOS inbox apps and services, I hear.
Microsoft's highest level MetaOS pitch is that it is focused on people and not tied to specific devices. Microsoft seems to be modeling itself a bit after Tencent's WeChat mobile social/payment app/service here, my sources say. Microsoft wants to create a single mobile platform that provides a consistent set of work and play services, including messaging, voice and video, digital payments, gaming, and customized document and news feeds. The MetaOS consists of a number of layers, or tiers, according to information shared with me by my contacts. At the lowest level, there's a data tier, which is implemented in the Office substrate and/or Microsoft Graph. This data tier is all about network identity and groups. There's also an application model, which includes work Microsoft is doing around Fluid Framework (its fast co-authoring and object embedding technology); Power Apps for rapid development and even the Visual Studio team for dev tools. Microsoft is creating a set of services and contracts for developers around Fluid Core, Search, personalization/recommendation, security, and management. For software vendors and customers,
Microsoft's highest level MetaOS pitch is that it is focused on people and not tied to specific devices. Microsoft seems to be modeling itself a bit after Tencent's WeChat mobile social/payment app/service here, my sources say. Microsoft wants to create a single mobile platform that provides a consistent set of work and play services, including messaging, voice and video, digital payments, gaming, and customized document and news feeds. The MetaOS consists of a number of layers, or tiers, according to information shared with me by my contacts. At the lowest level, there's a data tier, which is implemented in the Office substrate and/or Microsoft Graph. This data tier is all about network identity and groups. There's also an application model, which includes work Microsoft is doing around Fluid Framework (its fast co-authoring and object embedding technology); Power Apps for rapid development and even the Visual Studio team for dev tools. Microsoft is creating a set of services and contracts for developers around Fluid Core, Search, personalization/recommendation, security, and management. For software vendors and customers,
Well, that sounds encouraging (Score:2)
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Well, up until the first BSOD and well then it is over, M$ running you pacemaker.
My whole of life digital experience is to avoid M$ as much as possible, simply too unreliable and customer abusive. Device not working, THEY WILL, lie to your face about it for months, keep on selling it, trying to fix it, before admitting it. They have done this time and time again for decades, the same bullshit every single time. They are simply a corporation that does not deserve any kind of trust, they have repeatedly brok
Hmm ... (Score:2)
TFS seems more like meta astroturfing ... with the product mentioned 8 times.
Problem is that already exists (Score:4, Insightful)
This is already what the phones are. Apple, Google, Samsung have already done this and are established. MS is trying to compete without a device. They've lost the students to Chromebooks. They've lost the casual/home user to phones and Apple TV. They've screwed up the various streaming/social media attempts they've made. They messed up Skype. They're down and trying to make a comeback in games with Xbox. This is their last chance to be relevant outside of the office.
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They have their new Android phones. They are very business oriented.
I'll just leave this here (Score:4, Insightful)
"Whole Life"? Never! (Score:3)
MS already turns enough of my life to crap (at work) with their 3rd rated engineering, their barely functional user interfaces and the exceptional tediousness getting anything done with their barely functional "office" software.
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What's another new set of API's Abstraction Layers and tooling amongst friends eh?
I got fed up to the backteeth with their [redacted] and finally ditched them for good in 2016.
Server 2008 was rock solid and worked pretty well. 2012 came along and they'd messed around with stuff that worked and [redacted] it up big time. That's when I called it a day and moved over to Linux full time.
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The only real reason people use Microsoft is the shear number of online resources for troubleshooting and help. If you get stuck, 10,000 other people probably had the same issue already. When in a jam, one can always Youtube "How to dislodge MS-Teams from your colon without using combustibles or the registry."
It's the Network Effect applied to mass crap. No other vendor has the luxury of mass captive beta testers and documentors. They could not survive on merit alone.
That being said, lately they've sucked l
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Done. If anyone working at YouTube checks the search logs, they'll have a laugh.
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The only real reason people use Microsoft is the shear number of online resources for troubleshooting and help.
Can't agree, as real reason is traction. Inertia. It will take quite something, to get MS out of the "business as usual". There are desktops, they are Windows, there are business files, they are Excel and Word, there are corporate SAP apps, they are on top of Excel, there is corporate mail, which is Outlook, hooked into Office 365 mail service. It is cobweb of the business infrastructure, that holds you in.
Yet there are numbers to disagree: subscription to the Office 365 with apps is about 5 times pricier,
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But the inertia is fueled by the Network Effect. Okay, they reinforce each other, so I partly agree because reinforcing each other is yet another level of the Network Effect.
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Makes a lot of sense to me. And, being a PhD CS type with a lot of respective engineering experience (on Unix/Linux), I have to say the tips I sometimes find and that actually work on Windows or Office are so obscure they could just be black magic. It is like somebody reverse engineered the whole mess and then tells you which bits to change.
As to Oracle, maybe Oracle just sucks a lot more now and MS is just slow to catch up?
Byting off more than they can chew (Score:3)
Getting involved in personal info will create a Medusa of abuses and embarrassing leaks. I suggest they focus on business automation and collaboration, staying out of the bedroom. It's too hard to contain such these days. Google bungled privacy badly when they tried to integrate all their services. I can vouch personally about that. One Stop Slopping.
In addition to privacy concerns, Microsoft usually fails in the consumer arena anyhow: Zune, Bob, WinPhone/ME, MSN Watch. Xbox is their only real success. Consumers are just not their forte. Why force it?
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Microsoft usually fails in the consumer arena anyhow
That's what comes from loading up management with MBAs that have the attention span of a poodle. In my experience Windows Phone was actually quite good, and crashed/locked far less than the Android phone that it had replaced, but the ROI for the company was going to be longer than just a couple of years so they dumped it. The Zune was a nice piece of hardware (there are still a lot of them out there) that worked really well, but attempting to make it profitable too fast they priced it out of the market.
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I thought the main reason they gave up on Windows Phone was because it was a battery hog and they couldn't solve that without rewriting Windows from scratch, which is tricky because you need to match bug-for-bug to be compatible with desktop-based Windows applications, and if you are not compatible, there are few compelling reasons to use it. In other words, they realized they were stuck on the Bloat Boat.
MS stuck with Windows and XBox for the longer term because they knew they'd gradually get better with t
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But they still make money selling mice and keyboards . . .
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I suspect they outsource those to generic factories and slap their label on it. A common name-brand allows a degree of price markup. It's not a heavy investment for them, just short-term deals.
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Didn't the Project Manager marry Bill Gates....
Bob seems to have been a good product for her
MetaOS != Meta-OS (Score:2)
https://meta-os.com/ [meta-os.com]
Got confused there for a moment.
Resistance is Futile (Score:2)
No escape from Office 365. You will be assimilated.
hmm (Score:3)
"MetaOS has a lot to do with what's next for Microsoft Teams, Office, Edge, and more"
There are so many things MS does wrong, but I've got to say I've been pretty impressed with Teams.
Sounds good (Score:2)
This sounds like a plan.
The problem is that MS has not been able to demonstrate even internal consistency in products they make on platforms they control. Not ever.
Sounds like they've hired an Ideas Man and he's had an idea. Good for him.
This is just an operating system (Score:1)
In the olden days all we wanted the operating system to do was run our programs. Why does it need to be all the programs as well? Seriously, do OS's really need more features than they already have?
insert proprietary layer here (Score:2)
So... a layer between the OS and the application? To make the applications more consistent from device to device? Don't we already have a bunch of those?
I read it as another attempt to wedge themselves between the device (usually a web browser) and the applications. Tack on authentication services and integrate office applications and there you go, all the MS embedded sales operatives disguised as sysadmins are happy again.