The evolution of Windows in the cloud - Tackling Tech
[Show theme music] ♪ Oh yeah ♪ ♪ Woo ♪ ♪ Oh yeah ♪ HARJIT DHALIWAL: Hello, and welcome to "Tackling Tech." I'm Harjit Dhaliwal, and today we are celebrating the third anniversary of Windows 365. We've seen incredible momentum with customers and partners who are deploying the service to support every employee, from temp workers to contractors to frontline employees, with a secure, productive Windows experience in the cloud. Joining me to discuss our continued investment in Windows 365 is Aidan Marcuss, Corporate Vice President in Windows and Devices at Microsoft. Aidan, welcome to the show. AIDAN MARCUS: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
This is going to be fun. HARJIT: This is great. So Aidan, before we dive into the world of the Cloud PC, I want ask you a few questions so that our audience can better know you. What is your favorite nonwork activity that you enjoy doing? AIDAN: That's a pretty easy one for me. I and my whole family, we sail together, and so we like to explore the water around Seattle and go up into Canada, and we've taken some longer trips together. So, sailing is like an activity that binds our whole family together.
HARJIT: That's awesome. And you've got so much water around here to do that. AIDAN: It's amazing. It's incredible. And it just keeps going. HARJIT: Keeps going.
So, I love to do photography. I'm a photographer, and I love making videos. I'm into TikToks and things like that too, so it's a lot of fun. AIDAN: That's super fun. HARJIT: Yeah.
So, what about Windows 11? What's your favorite feature of Windows 11? Or one of the features that does not get a lot of limelight that it should? AIDAN: That is a tough question. I have many features I hold dear. Windows 11 is something that I love and work with every day. Probably the one that I have been using a lot of late is the Snipping tool.
Snipping tool has always been a big favorite of mine. It's got a whole bunch of new features in the last couple years. In particular, now if you take a snip of a window or a screen, you can actually extract the text out of it and with one click of a button. And so you can sort of just have a form, take a picture of it, and extract the text you need right out of it. So I've been using that a lot recently.
HARJIT: I love that feature, too, actually. I use it a lot myself. I also love a lot of the accessibility features. Fantastic. So let's move on to Windows in the cloud.
What was the vision when it first launched and how has it evolved today? AIDAN: It's really pretty incredible to think about 3 years, and what a 3 years it was. I think at the core, Windows 365 has a pretty straightforward promise. How do you get your PC but delivered through the cloud? That's why we call it a Cloud PC.
And by "PC," we mean your whole Windows experience. The features we were just talking about, accessible anywhere. And I think we've stayed pretty true to that vision and met the market at a moment where there was a lot of turmoil. COVID was incredibly challenging for so many people and so many companies. And Windows 365 in some sense met a need right away to help provide a much more flexible computing platform to enable contractors, like you talked about, or people who had to work from home get access to their PC right away. In fact, I was just talking to a customer who shared a story about how they just kept their whole workforce productive by letting them work from home with a corporate provision to manage Cloud PC.
And that sort of customer anecdote to me is sort of what's led us over the last 3 years. We had a very clear sense of what we were trying to build, but then really listening to customers in terms of what they needed. And we've been launching those things in the last couple years and launching on a pretty regular basis to make sure we sort of keep evolving the product and reaching more customers with that core offering.
HARJIT: On that note, let's talk about a few ways that Windows 365 has evolved since it first went to general availability. I've seen a lot of questions from the Tech Community, customers have been wondering, can Windows 365 Cloud PCs handle animations or large, high-processing workloads? What are you hearing from customers? AIDAN: Yeah, it's a question we hear a lot, too, and the definitive answer is yes. We launched a preview of our GPU SKUs at last year's Ignite, so that would've been Ignite in 2023. I think I always get confused in my years--last Ignite, and we've been working with that preview with customers, and that preview gives customers access to very powerful Cloud PCs. I mean really, really powerful Cloud PCs.
These GPUs don't pull any punches. And we offered GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA in that preview. And we have customers using it for a variety of things, everything from the types of animation or production activities you talked about all the way through very high-end visualization scenarios, where you have companies that have massive amounts of data. They need to visualize that, and they can do that all with their Cloud PC.
And to me it sort of points to one of the opportunities with Windows 365, where we can bring the power of Azure, kind of all of Azure to bear in someone's compute experience. And those GPU SKUs, I think, are a really good example of that, and I look forward to those getting to general availability soon. HARJIT: An area that's often overlooked when it comes to digital transformation is the Frontline worker. How do you see the role of Windows 365 and Cloud PC play a vital role in this workforce? AIDAN: It's a great question, and I think we hear that from customers a lot. If you think about what Windows 365 is at its very core, it's about delivering Windows apps and experiences in a simple, secure, easy-to-manage way, with a great end-user experience. I don't want to lose sight of that.
It really matters whether or not the person using the Cloud PC has a great experience, and those workers who work with a specific set of apps and the IT pros who work hard to make sure those apps are available and they work and have a great experience want the same things. And so we've been working hard to bring new Windows 365 offerings, including Frontline, so you can bring all the benefits and attributes of Windows 365 to those new scenarios, where you're like, look, I want these two apps, or I have a workstation that I share, I work at it for this number of hours. Next shift picks it up and works on it for the next set of hours. We can really, I think, simplify the experience for IT pros while delivering a better end-user experience. And I see a tremendous opportunity for customers and for us with them there. HARJIT: I agree with you. I love it.
I love what you said. And there's so many use cases of Windows 365 Frontline, right? From nurses, doctors, factories, and things like that. So, it's just tremendous what we have done in the space for our customers. AIDAN: And it's interesting. I think when you really take a step back and think about it, "frontline" sometimes feels like a constraining word. We're really talking about shared PC experiences.
Think about how many PCs in the world are shared among multiple users, and all of those, those are all opportunities to think about how are they going to bring those forward to the cloud? HARJIT: Absolutely. As we know, the future of Windows is cloud native, and Windows 365 is part of that vision. How does that work for our customers, and where do you see that evolving? AIDAN: Yeah. I mean, what a complex time to work in information technology. If your job is making sure all the employees at your company are safe and secure and productive and enabled with the latest technology, there are so many things you have to think about. And I think what we're seeing is, as customers look at end-user computing and start to consider Windows 365, they're taking that moment to also look at their whole estate.
How do they manage devices? How do they get apps deployed? And they're seeing benefits of moving to the cloud across so many of those things. Just take a look at some of the customers we've recently won with Windows 365. They're not just moving to Windows 365, they're moving to Windows 365 and taking a step forward in their cloud-native approach across the board with Intune and all of the things they need associated with that. And moving to that platform, I think what they would tell us is, moving to that platform and those choices are helping them then accelerate all those other things they want to do. How do they deliver the latest in AI capabilities to their end users? How do they keep up with the latest security and update technologies? They're able to move at a velocity that I think really, I hope, and I think we hope helps make their jobs easier and helps let them empower their end users in a way that they couldn't before. HARJIT: People have read about Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, and security is definitely top of mind for us in the products and features that we build.
How does Windows 365 incorporate the security? AIDAN: Thank you for asking this. This is super important. I hear it from customers every day, and I think it's essential to them putting trust in the products and to us delivering on that trust. It starts with a very basic premise: We're building for a zero-trust world. We're building for a world in which an IT professional can be comfortable and know that their data is secure, the access is the access they intended to have happen, and they know how to manage those devices in the best possible way.
When I think about it, there's really two things that really I think anchor us within that built for zero trust. One is securing access to that Cloud PC, and we keep working to innovate on what tools we make available though, for example, Conditional Access, which is a capability that lets someone really fine-tune the access that we allow to that PC in the cloud. And I think it builds upon a whole set of authentication technologies, two-factor opportunities that we have to really make sure there's the highest level of security and choice for an IT professional around what they want to enable. And then, there's the device itself. The device itself, whether it's a physical PC or a Cloud PC, it's still a Windows PC.
And so we have to care about the security of that machine that's running. And when it's running in the cloud, we make sure all the capabilities that you expect on a physical PC are there. So for example, of course there's a TPM, it's a virtual TPM, but there's a TPM that lets you keep your data encrypted. We're using virtualization-based security to enable us to have a high-security area and make sure we know the integrity of kernel components and be able to store credentials securely. And so the things that we talk about as Windows 11 security promises apply to Cloud PCs just as much as they do physical PCs. And I think it's really essential to the overall idea of, I know what this is, I know how to manage it, and by having it in the cloud, I've got more opportunities to manage it in an easier fashion, keep it updated all the time, and really fine-grained control access.
HARJIT: Absolutely. I love that you actually hit a lot of those key security features. You mentioned VPS, you mentioned TPM, zero-trust mindset, and Conditional Access.
They're all extremely important that we've built into this. And then there's update management, which is so important. How are Windows 365 Cloud PCs kept up-to-date? AIDAN: What a great question, because we get asked this all the time. Obviously it's top of mind. Anyone who's managed Windows PCs thinks about this.
So let's start with the very basics. First time you set up a Cloud PC, one of the first things that happens is, we update it with the latest updates from Windows Update. Pretty straightforward. Second after that, it's managed through Intune.
Intune is how we manage physical PCs, it's how you can manage Cloud PCs. It's not a different tool chain. You don't have to learn a new skill set. You don't have to learn different policies.
The things that you have learned apply equally to your Cloud PC. I think it's super important. And then, last but not least, you can also enroll in Autopatch so you can take that next step and further simplify update management with your Cloud PC. And so when I really think about the sort of updating footprint of a Cloud PC, I think we're delivering a system that really simplifies it down and uses tools that customers are familiar with, which let us let customers get productive right away.
HARJIT: Simplification is the key here, right? So, if you already have Intune and you're managing your physical devices, you can do that with Windows 365, as well. AIDAN: And if you're sophisticated and you manage rings of updates and you really use Intune to its fullest extent, all of that applies to your Cloud PC, as well. And so you can sort of pick your level of control and have all that same flexibility. HARJIT: Yeah, absolutely. Recently at Build, Pavan Davuluri spoke about Windows as the canvas of AI innovation.
What does that mean, and how does Windows 365 play into that AI innovation? AIDAN: Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty exciting time to be working in making PCs and making Windows. The opportunity for AI to tangibly improve our products and help customers get jobs done faster seems really real and quite tangible. And we've demoed some of those features. We've launched new Windows PCs in the last couple months that bring together new capabilities that are really only possible because of the AI accelerators that we have on board.
And when I think about Windows 365, at the most basic level are opportunities to reach customers on any endpoint with great AI capabilities. You can fire up a new Windows 365 PC today and get Copilot, get it set up with your Microsoft 365 subscription, and deploy that rapidly across any number of customers or users in your user base in a super-seamless fashion. So, that AI capability, it's available right there in your Cloud PC. I think over time, we see even more capabilities, more AI capabilities to deliver through Windows 365. And again, deliver those to any endpoint, whether you're using a Windows PC or something else.
So you don't have limit where those AI capabilities can go. You can really reach your entire user base. HARJIT: That's awesome. I'm also actually really excited from Build about our new Copilot+ PCs that are bringing so much more capabilities and functionality. Are you using one? AIDAN: Absolutely. Every day.
HARJIT: What's your best feature? AIDAN: Oh, that's a tough one. I think the one I use certainly all day, every day are the Windows Studio Effects. That's the sort of fancy background blur that we have. And then, I've been starting to use the Live Translations more.
One of my children is learning a foreign language, and so we've been trying to find those videos on YouTube, and we turn on and off Live Translations to sort of check how understanding is going with what's going on. So, it's pretty cool that you can sort of translate from almost any language to many other languages with just the click of a button. HARJIT: Yeah, the Live Translations feature on the Copilot+ PCs is...I love it. I love it. It's amazing how we can just transfer from one language to another. You're like, holy cow.
AIDAN: Yeah, totally. HARJIT: What is the vision of Copilot in Windows? How do you see productivity changing in the workplace? AIDAN: Yeah. I mean, that's a big question, right? I think the opportunity seems really large to help people just accomplish things easier. Sometimes, it can sound very complicated, but the reality is, if we can make a job easier or make someone feel like they've got a superpower, then we're winning.
And I think of AI kind of that way. Copilot in Windows provides a capability that was never there before, and you get a chance to ask it a whole variety of questions and start to learn where can I help me be a little bit more productive? I've been on my own learning journey about, you know, how do I get more productive with Copilot? We've separated out into a stand-alone app now, which will let it iterate quite quickly. But the AI innovation doesn't just stop there.
We also have delivered these new Copilot+ PCs, and they have new features that are AI powered, and they're integrated right into the Windows experience sort of right available to you. Whether it's the generative AI in the Paint Cocreator or it's in the live translations that we were talking about, all of these AI features are meant to just reduce complexity and help someone feel like they've got a superpower. And I think we're just really at the start of this journey. And when it comes to Windows 365, we plan to bring these sorts of capabilities into Windows 365, as well. Copilot's already there, but we will also keep working and pushing how do we bring some of those new AI capabilities that we're bringing onto the local PC into the cloud so that when a customer is ready to move to the cloud and has embraced AI, they'll have the full capabilities out there.
And I think the last piece is Windows is a platform. It is an open platform. And so as we announced at Build, we're making big investments at a platform level to let developers...because after all, if it's about getting things done and simplifying jobs, one of Windows' greatest strengths are all the apps people use every day.
And where do those apps come from? They come from developers. And developers get energized and get empowered when we create new capabilities for them. And so really building on an openness, delivering new platform capabilities, I'm kind of most excited to see what developers do out there across the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of apps that exist in companies all over the world and how they'll start to take advantage of this capability and move it forward.
HARJIT: Yeah. We've built Copilot. I mean, we've integrated Copilot into Windows and are moving it to an app and things like that and made it simple and easier, but we've also incorporated Copilot into the ecosystem of Microsoft products. It's just phenomenal. We use it a lot at Microsoft. I use it a lot, as well, but on a personal level, I use it to do other things-- for example, planning your trips.
If you're going on a vacation and stuff like that, right? You just plug in, you put the number of days you're going, from where to where, and what to do. It just gives you so much information and capabilities. AIDAN: Yeah. What a starting point.
My team, we were... one of the things we like to do is share prompts, and we did one last week where basically the prompt was "look at my emails, look at my meetings over the last couple weeks, and create a superhero profile. Describe my attributes, describe how I like to communicate, describe my superpowers."
And it was just a blast. Everyone created a profile, and then we all shared it out, and we had so much fun because at some level, it was eerily good at sort of describing what everyone's individual strengths were. And I think we're just seeing the tip of what is a huge opportunity.
There's so much more to come here, so many more updates. We talked a lot about end-user Copilots, but Copilots for IT and simplifying their tasks, whether it's managing PCs or anything other things they've got to do, I think we've just got a ton here, and there's probably a lot to look forward to. HARJIT: Yeah, I'm going to try that superhero prompt. I'm going to get back to you on that. And with that, we wrap up this episode of "Tackling Tech."
Thanks, Aidan. AIDAN: Thank you. HARJIT: To our colleagues in the Windows 365 product and engineering teams, happy anniversary.
We can't wait to see what's next for Cloud PC. Don't forget to subscribe and comment on today's podcast. I'll see you next time for more on "Tackling Tech." [Show theme music]
2024-10-13 07:31
