“All your code bases are belong us.” Let me modify that internet meme to sum up the big news from Microsoft’s Build developer conference today. Microsoft is going to make it easy to turn iOS and Android apps into Windows apps, effectively hoping to use those platforms to catapult Microsoft and Windows 10 into new greatness.
Build is Microsoft’s big yearly gathering for developers. It kicked off today with an opening keynote that, if you weren’t a developer, was incredibly boring. Believe me, I know. I’m not a developer. Code was shown; services were discussed. It was mind-numbing — if you weren’t a developer.
But wake up. Even as a non-developer, there were parts that could be understood. The most important was that Microsoft is making tools available so that — it says — developers who have created iOS and Android apps can easily bring them to Windows. Even Chrome apps can be modified easily, Microsoft said, to run in Microsoft’s new Microsoft Edge browser (formerly called Project Spartan).
It gave a few demonstrations of this, with promises that it’s all incredibly simple. If this proves to be the case, it could be incredibly attractive to developers. For very little additional work, they can tap into the Windows platform.
And this isn’t the traditional Windows platform many might be thinking, that operating system that runs on the desktop. Windows 10 is a multi-device platform. Write for Windows 10 once, and the same code can run apps for desktop, tablet, smartphone and even HoloLens. Microsoft made a big deal that the Windows “device family” will be 1 billion strong, when Windows 10 finally comes out later this year.
Microsoft said that will mean it’s about twice the size of Android and even bigger than iOS. And that size, it also says, matters because developers will have a larger audience to make money from. How it all really plays out remains to be seen, of course. But that’s the promise Microsoft dangled in front of its developer audience today.
Below, our live blog of how the event went, with more details. Microsoft also has a blog post up that summarizes all the morning’s news.
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