It’s fair to say the announcements at Build 2016 related to Microsoft’s big push into bots as the next platform for computing – what it terms ‘Conversations as a Platform’ – were unexpected (last year, the news about HoloLens was equally out of the blue). It sees ‘conversations as a platform’ bringing together people, digital assistants, bots and artificial intelligence.
The importance of this move shouldn’t be underestimated. Microsoft missed mobile (well, to be technically correct, it didn’t… it just couldn’t make the requisite leap beyond the desktop paradigm – it didn’t understand why and how mobile was different).
Given that, it is hell-bent on not missing this next wave of computing, as Vlad Savov at The Verge correctly argues.
But bots aren’t a platform in and of themselves (yet?).
Messaging apps consume a fair chunk of the time that we spend on our smartphones. For some, that’s iMessage or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. For others, Snapchat, WeChat(/Weixin), Viber, Line, Kik or Hangouts. Or Slack. (Twitter missed this with its direct messages (DM) platform, which remains stillborn.)
Very rapidly, this category of apps is sucking up all of the time we spend on our phones. Well, this and video… increasingly surfaced in messaging apps. (There’s more than enough research that shows we only really use a handful of apps regularly.)
And messaging apps have long realised that first – this attention is immensely valuable and second – messaging is not enough in and of itself.
Witness Snapchat’s updates this week – a big statement of intent. WhatsApp’s becoming more and more useful (and that API is on its way). Facebook’s decision to spin out Messenger as its own app and its own platform (the emergence of which is accelerating) looks inspired in hindsight.
WeChat is perhaps the furthest along in terms of building out a true platform, grounded in messaging. But, it comes from a paradigm rooted in Asia and it continues to struggle to gain significant traction outside of China.
Of course, the logical conclusion of messaging (the ‘future’) is bots, as humans, messaging, mobile (and the operating system), apps and artificial intelligence converge.
We’re already quite accustomed to the concept of ‘AI’ in our daily lives, thanks to digital assistants like Siri, Google Now or Cortana. None are true artificial intelligence, but we ask Siri questions and she (or he) answers. Ditto with Cortana. And Google Now proactively suggests things. Magical. Somewhat. Blending this with a messaging interface seems logical (hey, humans love talking!).
Now, as Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans points out, “the Siri ‘this is what you can ask’ screen is essentially a command line help prompt, whereas the whole point of a GUI was that you didn’t have to know what you could type anymore. Though natural language processing means you don’t need to know a specific syntax for Siri or a bot, there’s still a basic discovery issue – what can I ask, given I can’t ask [just] anything?
“All of this means that for now, it seems that a bot or conversational UI might work best for something very specific – where the user knows what they can ask, and where those are the only things that they will ask.”
Self-described “digitally native news outlet for the new global economy” Quartz’s news app, which uses a IM/conversation interface to surface content has successfully turned the traditional publishing model on its head. And it works very very well because it’s something very specific. Expect more innovation by other publishers and brands in this paradigm. This is not simply about ordering a pizza in Skype or calling an Uber in Facebook Messenger.
But, the danger here is that bots are seen as the answers to every problem in every context, at least in the short- to medium-term. This would be akin to the current ‘Everyone wants/needs an app because everyone must have one’ situation.
Where and how does Microsoft fit into this future of bots?
Sure, it wants to be the underlying platform (for other platforms?), the ‘plumbing’… And it’s hurtling along this road with intent, given how quickly, broadly and deeply it’s building out Azure. CEO Satya Nadella’s line in his opening remarks that “We want to make things so that others can make things (and make things happen)” sums it up well.
That’s only one third of the puzzle. The second, as Evans argues, is identity. Here, Microsoft has a problem in mobile, but beyond that retains a significant stronghold. It’s no surprise – in this context – that it announced biometric authentication for Windows 10, even extending this into the browser. Take this across the desktop, tablets and Xbox, and you start to see a pretty compelling story.
The third piece, the ‘terminal’ is as problematic as the second. Microsoft has no real foothold here, given that it’s all but conceded on mobile.
Skype is certainly one way in but this depends on how it shifts the perception of that product away from (effectively) VoIP calling and IM on the desktop (the product has matured way beyond that, but the perception remains).
Cortana is possibly another, but how does Cortana co-exist alongside a native assistant a la Siri or Google Now (or Amazon Echo) with deep operating system integration?
I suspect this ‘terminal’ side of the equation is occupying a lot of time and attention in Redmond right now…