Trillion Microsoft

Microsoft has become the third US company to pass a market cap of $1 trillion. The software giant passed the milestone briefly this week after a jump in stock price following strong fiscal Q3 earnings. Microsoft joins Apple and Amazon in hitting the $1 trillion valuation ahead of rival Google.

Microsoft has overtaken Apple in market cap value for the first time in eight years. Microsoft briefly reached a market cap value of $812.93 billion this week, followed by Apple at a market cap of $812.60 billion. It made Microsoft the world’s most valuable company, even if it was only a temporary title. Microsoft and Apple are now trading back and forth for the title.

Microsoft’s latest earnings also revealed that the three main buckets the company splits its businesses up into are all doing well and roughly contributing the same amount of revenue this quarter (around 30 percent each).

1. Office, LinkedIn, and Dynamics = $10.2 billion in revenue
2. Azure cloud, server products, and enterprise services = $9.7 billion in revenue
3. Windows, Xbox, and Surface = $10.7 billion in revenue

Microsoft failed spectacularly in the mobile era with its Windows Phone efforts, but the company has shown it’s resilient. Microsoft is now focused on cross-platform technologies, the cloud, artificial intelligence, and is aiming to secure the future of quantum computing and mixed reality computing.

All of these efforts will face intense competition from Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other companies, so expect to see a lot of market cap position trading in the years ahead

Visual Studio 2019 Ready

This week, Visual Studio 2019 got launched on Tue 2 Apr.  With Microsoft's Open
Source strategy, it is built for any developer, any app and any platform.

Three high level advancement in VS 2019, are:

1. Develop: Stay focused and productive with improved performance, instant code cleanup, and better search results.
2. Collaborate: Enjoy natural collaboration through a cloud-first workflow, real-time editing and debugging, and code reviews right in Visual Studio.
3. Debug: Highlight and navigate to specific values, optimize memory use, and take automatic snapshots of your application's execution.

For a complete list of VS 2019 product is available at Visual Studio 2019 release notes.

As usual, the product is available in 3 mode (1) Community (2) Professional and (3) Enterprise

Block Coffee

I termed 'Block Coffee' from Block chain technology enabled Coffee industry. 

 The Coffee Board of India has launched a pilot blockchain-based e-marketplace in order to integrate coffee farmers with markets. On 28 Mar, Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) announced the idea to reduce the number of intermediaries between coffee growers and buyers - "bean to coffee".

According to Indian business publication Business Line, the application will initially launch in a pilot phase with a limited number of growers for the next four to five months. Should the test prove successful it will be expanded to all growers in the country. There are over 350,000 coffee growers in India, according to Business Line.

Blockchain has been actively adopted by food producers around the world in a bid to bring more efficiency to their supply chains. Recently, the United States National Pork Board partnered with startup ripe.io to test out a blockchain platform for pork supply chains.

This new platform will purportedly enable the Board to monitor and evaluate sustainability practices, food safety standards, livestock health, and environmental protections.

Apple Card

Yday, Apple announced Apple Card, an innovative, new kind of credit card created by Apple and designed to help customers lead a healthier financial life.

For years, as the iPhone has become ubiquitous and sales have started to slow, Apple has tried to emulate the paradigm-shifting success of the App Store and iTunes before it by barreling its way into TV and film, mobile payments, and news.

But time and again over the last half-decade or so, Apple has run into the hard economic and logistic reality of trying to change industries that are far less malleable than mobile software and music.

Apple Pay may be a bold vision of the future, it’ll likely be years before contactless digital payments become truly mainstream in the US.  Apple’s strategy mirrors that of Amazon.

Visual Studio 2019 Launch

Microsoft is holding a day-long, virtual launch event for the next major version of its developer platform, Visual Studio 2019, on April 2. Microsoft plans to highlight how the 2019 release can improve developer productivity and AI features.  Ref: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/

VS 2019 includes Microsoft's Visual Studio Live Share coding-collaboration service installed by default. The product features a new start window to help users get coding faster; improved search capabilities; overall performance improvements, Visual Studio IntelliCode AI assistance; better Python virtual and conda support; and support for .NET Core 3.0 projects, including WinForms and WPF, among other features.

Microsoft released a first public preview of Visual Studio 2019 in December 2018; Preview 2 in January 2019; and Preview 3 on February 13, 2019.

If you want to be in person, no worries.  Microsoft announced 212 local events and feel free to reserve your seat at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/local-events/

Microsoft's annual Build developer conference will be a month after the VS 2019 launch, on May 6 to 8 in Seattle, USA.

Feature Flag Driven Development

With 25 years of industry experience, it is so exciting to sail through the positive transformations of Information Technology (IT). This week blog, I'm going to cover the engineering process in stead of usual technology topic.

On start of my career, Waterfall process was ruling the industry. In the world of waterfall, you will typically see one continuous build that culminates in a single deploy.  After this deploy, you’ll receive feedback and fix some bugs, but you will likely need to restart the process for any major feature releases.

Waterfall matures into Agile, Continuous Delivery, Test Driven, Lean, Feature Flag Driven development process. Diagram depicts Agile vs FDD.

Emerging industry trend is Feature Flag Driven Development (FDD), which is completely aligned with the recent model - "Collaboration". Microsoft is the best role model for this transformation.  They were closed technology company during inception; but promoting strongly on "Collaborative" Open Source model.

Feature flag driven development allows you to quickly release iterations of your features to market, receive feedback, improve, and redeploy.  It allows you to roll out features to small segments of your users in order to mitigate risk all while receiving valuable feedback.  More importantly, your team will converge and collaborate based on real market feedback and make the necessary improvements to drive the product forward.

Leader moves life forward with the sacrifices, who jump in and get their hands dirty actually doing it.  I'm blessed to be part of FDD transformation using my current work assignment.

Ref: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureToggle.html

Google PhD Fellowship

Google PhD Fellowships directly support graduate students as they pursue their PhD, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor.

Google is currently offering Fellowships in Australia, China and East Asia, Europe, Africa, India, the United States and Canada.

If you are interested, feel free to leverage the site at https://scholarship-positions.com/google-phd-fellowship-program-graduate-students/2018/11/30/