“You should get yourself a real computer, my friend,” Satya Nadella told a reporter four years ago, during an interview where the latter dared to show up with an iPad. His position hasn’t changed much. And during the closing speech of the event in which Microsoft, of which he has recently also been president as well as CEO, unveiled the new Windows 11, somehow returned to the attack on the Apple ecosystem.
Nadella changed the face of Microsoft, turning it into a giant of the cloud and services. In the presentation he defined the new operating system as a “platform for platform creators”, And then intervened at the end of the event focusing on one front only. Attempting to convince developers and programmers that Windows is a better place to engage and market their software and apps than macOS and iOS. Also because – he explained – on Windows PCs people can keep a more direct control of their computers, thus obviously also meaning the hardware aspect.
Open, simple, innovative: here is Windows 11
by Carolina Milanesi
Native support for Android applications
But they are the steps forward in the Microsoft Store, and in the rules on which it is organized, to mark this diversity. Why? First of all for one of the bombs dropped yesterday and which had been talked about for some time: the native support of Windows 11 at applications of the Android ecosystem (and also those designed for Amazon). An answer, not too difficult to grasp, to Apple’s steps. But to decree its success, and avoid shipwrecks like that of the old Project Astoria of 2015, the collaboration of the developers is needed, even if Intel will put its Bridge technology in it, able to make the use of apps designed for smartphones acceptable even on PCs.
Free payments on the Microsoft Store
Second point: i payments. There is a process that will make history, the one that precisely on the use of autonomous methods and on commissions, but in general on the antitrust logic in this area, contrasts Apple with the Epic videogame house (that of Fortnite). In this respect, Windows surpasses all: applications will be able to use their own payment systems if they want to. “A platform can only serve society if its rules allow for this fundamental innovation and the creation of new categories,” said Nadella. A fairly rhetorical passage which, however, read in the thorny current context, sounds like a blow to Cupertino and its “golden enclosure” but still tight. Third point: the condition of the developers, the influence and pressures they suffer by virtue of the constraints imposed to use channels such as the App Store, from commissions of 30% (lowered to 15% for children and independents) up bans on promoting alternative payment channels and so on.
The new philosophy: apps as autonomous platforms
So Apple is “the bad one” and Microsoft wants to try to hook a new message of openness and open competition to Windows 11? It depends. On the other hand, Microsoft has also tried to follow the same path as Apple, without being able to build a proprietary and in some way “closed” store, and it is natural that now it has definitively embarked on, at least as regards the applications, a diametrically opposite philosophy. That of making room for others, of supporting Android apps, of not setting too many limits in terms of payments and making Windows an environment in which applications become platforms themselves.
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The opening to Apple
Despite the continuous thrusts, obviously Nadella could not completely close the door in Cupertino, which is the host of the most important of those platforms: as she reiterated in a slightly less bellicose interview with Wall Street Journal, Windows would be very ready to integrate any service Apple wanted to offer outside its world, starting with iMessage. A perspective, the one seen before and even that with the group led by Tim Cook, which Microsoft can now grant itself because its business model, for some time now, no longer passes from devices or even from Windows but from infrastructural platforms such as Microsoft 365, Azure , services for businesses andhuge amount of patents: on artificial intelligence alone it counts over 18 thousand, ahead of competitors such as ibm and Samsung.
Microsoft a “democratizing force”
In short, forcing the story in part – for example, passing over the dominant positions and the famous 497 million euros imposed by the then European competition commissioner Mario Monti – Nadella recalled the role of Windows as a “democratizing force” for the world. He stressed the maximum freedom to use and build apps, games and PCs, create your own community and experience others, buy or feed your business. Windows 11 will therefore renew this mission “removing the barriers“, Allowing people to”choose the applications we use, the contents we use and the people we connect to, even what we pay attention to ”. Up to the definition that has remained most impressed in observers: “a platform for platform creators”. That is, in Nadella’s vision, a platform for the web of the future, for new types of software and for new personalized content. It will be a long journey, which will last no less than ten years. In the meantime, we will have the first contact with Windows 11 by 2021.
There is no room for Skype in the new Windows 11
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