Microsoft hopes to build a new foundation layer on top of SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure (Microsoft’s machine learning infrastructure) to improve the user experience when using its productivity cloud.
Microsoft already has a “productivity cloud” and its Microsoft 365/Office 365 series of products. Supporting Office 365 is a layer called the “bottom layer”, which is Microsoft’s customer data platform. (The idea of building the bottom layer within Microsoft has been around for some time, initially as part of the Exchange data storage architecture.)
Microsoft is currently working to build a large distributed platform, or foundation, which will be located on top of SharePoint, Office 365 substrate, Azure, and Microsoft’s machine learning infrastructure. In my opinion, MeTAOS sounds like Microsoft is trying to advance the underlying vision and messaging by emphasizing how its artificial intelligence technology will make it more useful on all platforms where Office 365 applications currently work.
MeTAOS/Taos is not an operating system like Windows or Linux as we currently think. It is more like a layer that Microsoft hopes to develop, using the underlying user data to make the user experience and user-oriented applications more intelligent and proactive.
The job description of Taos’s chief engineering manager mentions the basic layer:
“We are eager to create a platform on this foundation-a platform for people and the work they want to do instead of our devices, applications, and technologies. This vision has the potential to define the future of Microsoft 365, and to the entire industry make a large impact.”
The related SharePoint/MeTA job description will add some additional context:
“We are very happy to transform our customers into’artificial intelligence natives’. By providing them with timely and actionable notifications to understand their intentions, technology has enhanced their capabilities and enabled them to use files, web pages, news and Other content completes tasks efficiently and adapts to their work habits.”
In short, MeTAOS/Taos may be the next step in the Office 365 substrate path.
Microsoft officials did not disclose too much information about the underlying layer in public, but it is basically a set of storage and other services at the core of Office 365. Microsoft’s goal is to store all files and information (or at least copies of this information) that users use to create, collaborate, and communicate on the bottom layer. Just as Office 365 expert tonyredmond worked at Petri.com last year, Microsoft’s vision is to make Office 365 work like a “star-star operating system”
Redmond discussed a video from Jeffrey Snover, a Microsoft technical researcher and architect of the Office 365 Smart Substrate Platform (now the original). In that video, Snover compared Office 365 with Windows, and pointed out that both have built-in applications and application stores; write consistent application programming interfaces, and the ability to manage and protect resources. Resources in the Office case It is user, document, message, calendar and security services.
So far, Office 365 is basically a first-party product, and different departments of Microsoft, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Outlook and Bing, are developing/promoting it. Microsoft intends to contact third-party developers through the Substrate Day in 2019. But this incident never happened, and this part of the substrate strategy seems to be further postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Microsoft has a placeholder base page for developer documentation and other content, but it is still not publicly available.)
The goal of MetaOS is to build a new foundation layer on top of the bottom layer and Microsoft’s other core technologies through a new foundation layer, so that Microsoft’s intelligent bottom layer can be “intelligent” more widely. Microsoft’s unified search service is also likely to be a key part of this plan, because anything stored needs to be able to be found and surfaced.
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