Another week, another collection of announcements to keep even the most informed Microsoft enthusiast busy deciphering between what the company said officially and what they’ve left seemingly open for interpretation.
This week, Microsoft accompanied its OEM and ODM partners on stage at Computex 2016 to join several announcements regarding Windows 10 and its future with hardware.
Computex 2016
From exclusive Porsche designed 2-in-1 devices to new fingerprint scanner wearables, the parade of Windows 10 related hardware rolled out in spectacular fashion throughout the week in Taipei. Among the most notable announcements at this year’s Computex expo was the resurface of the HP Elite X3 Windows 10 Mobile phone and Microsoft’s detailing of the Windows Holographic operating system, intended to be the desktop replacement for both augmented and virtual reality experiences.
Heading 5,413 miles backs to the US, news coming out of the Microsoft Redmond campus brought the announcement of a monumental change in guard of the Windows Insider Preview program. No longer will Insiders be communicating with crowd favorite, Gabe Aul, but instead dealing with the massively accomplished Windows engineer Dona Sarkar, who will be fielding communications for the program for the foreseeable future.
Xbox and E3 2016 news
Mixed in with the rest of the week’s news were Xbox related shuffles and announcements that included a price drop for the Xbox One a week before the company’s E3 keynote as well as the addition of a Xbox VR category added to its list of briefing details.
Microsoft’s smart car future
Rounding out the week’s biggest Microsoft news was the company’s resurfacing in the conversation around smart cars. After a couple of high-profile departures from the category, Microsoft seemingly went dark on any development of software or tools that could be used in the growing smart car industries.
6,487 miles away from Redmond Washington, Microsoft’s business development chief Peggy Johnson spoke at the Convergence conference in Hong Kong about Microsoft’s new involvement with automobile manufacturers and smart cars. Instead of building driverless cars like Google or going the potential Apple route of building a high-end luxury car, Microsoft will be retrenching its efforts in providing back-end software support to companies.
We won’t be building our own autonomous vehicle, but we would like to enable autonomous vehicles and assisted driving as well.”
Once again, Microsoft appears to be looking ahead to the day where assisted, or self-driving cars are the norm and it wants to build an office-like experience in vehicles for the dedicated business person on the go, while also providing a cloud infrastructure to companies to analyze vehicle metrics in real time.
Next week
Obviously, this isn’t all of the news announced this week and much of it will vary in importance individually, but we encourage you to keep it locked on WinBeta for any and all Microsoft related news. Being a week out from the E3 2016 gaming convention, we’re sure more Xbox news will leak as specifics and briefings details get locked in for the Xbox division, stay tuned
