Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
azure.microsoft.com
Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#2MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1 on the web and on mobile.
However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product.
This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Microsoft needs to understand that more and more features doesn't mean more perceived value.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#3This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#4MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1 on the web and on mobile. However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product. This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Micros…
Integration into VS is a huge value add, by doing so MS guarantees that VS becomes the most easy platform to do ML development in
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#5This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.
Something about me feels that these efforts by IBM and Microsoft around AI are less around providing Open Source tools to democratize AI and more around providing "big data" style tools to "big enterprise". Both companies made TONS of $$$ selling Business Intelligence tools (SQL Server Analysis Services, Cognos, etc). They are smart enough to see the danger in open source tools like TensorFlow, Spark, etc. cutting into their lucrative revenue streams in the enterprise.
In particular, Microsoft has always been great about providing tools for no to low cost at the entry level, to get you (or more likely your company) hooked into the ecosystem. Not making a criticism, they have made some great stuff over the years (see the Visual Studio ecosystem for example).
The other angle is providing these tools, which can be complex to install/configure/manage, as a service offering via a subscription as part of the Azure platform. Recently MS has been hiring every superstar/rockstar evangelist/advocate/architect/engineer/etc to help design/build/promote/advocate for Azure that they can find (See Jessie Frazelle, @catie, and a ton of key people in the Golang world). Microsoft isn't just coming to play, they're playing to win.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#6MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1 on the web and on mobile. However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product. This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Micros…
Integration into VS is a huge value add, by doing so MS guarantees that VS becomes the most easy platform to do ML development in
Many people doing AI/ML right now are not using Windows. By asking them to move to Visual Studio you are implicitly asking them to move to Windows. Only by doing that you are making it extremely difficult to adopt such technology.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#7This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.
Access to AI/ML is already very democratic. Takes little time to set run Tensorflow from a docker image, or learn from Jupyter notebooks, etc... with fully open source projects where you can consult the source code and see how an algorithm is implemented.
In contrast this involves running a proprietary operating system, IDE, closed source, etc... Quite the contrary to anything that could be considered democratic.
Then, ML is all about volume. Open a spreadsheet with more than 10000 rows in Excel and see it squirm in pain.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#8Sounds like Microsoft is trying to make a big push specially considering the 8000 strong number in their AI division. Interesting juncture as they seem to have an opportunity to catch on. I hear there is a holy war within Microsoft where one sanct feels Windows and Office are still the bread and butter and therefore all AI related investment should go in the direction whereas the other sanct is pushing towards independent offerings through Azure like Cognitive Services,
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#9This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.
Something about me feels that these efforts by IBM and Microsoft around AI are less around providing Open Source tools to democratize AI and more around providing "big data" style tools to "big enterprise". Both companies made TONS of $$$ selling Business Intelligence tools (SQL Server Analysis Services, Cognos, etc). They are smart enough to see the danger in open source tools like TensorFlow, Spark, etc. cutting in…
IBM and Microsoft can embrace the open source tools Tensorflow and Spark by offering Enterprise Support (I know IBM has made a large investment in Spark). Their competitors would be databricks and Google. By being simply not Google that could win over people. Also, both of them need something to differentiate their cloud offering from Amazon.
Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Integration into VS is a huge value add, by doing so MS guarantees that VS becomes the most easy platform to do ML development in
Many people doing AI/ML right now are not using Windows. By asking them to move to Visual Studio you are implicitly asking them to move to Windows. Only by doing that you are making it extremely difficult to adopt such technology.
vscode runs on Windows, Mac and Linux