Microsoft Ignite 2024

For the first time, last week I attended Ignite in Chicago. I've been to a handful of other industry trade shows and there is something special about something so targeted. Obviously this was only Microsoft. More often than not other conventions have such a mismatched breadth of booths and reasons to go. Not Ignite.

I'm not going to go over all the cool stuff announced. There are plenty of sites for that. Instead I'll focus on the things that caught my attention in particular.

AI. AI in every software. AI in every hardware. It is completely unsurprising that Microsoft is continuing to build out their AI offerings in this way, but I never could imagine it would go in this direction.

First of all, NPUs? You're telling me now we're adding additional processors dedicated to offloading AI processing? We've rapidly made this hardware jump with little fanfare. Maybe its just me but it seems crazy that an entire new hardware standard has been created so soon.

AI in File Explorer's search is very cool. No longer will you only have to search for titles for files. Now you can search for content. You remember that picture you're looking for has a ferris wheel in the background? Search for "ferris wheel." It will search the content of images until it finds that picture!

Agents are also very cool. Now you can have "personas" to help manage work. Need a project manager? Someone to take meeting notes? Before long everyone will have their own personal assistant.

Next was some Surface Hub announcements. Since their inception Surface Hubs and Teams Rooms have been different ecosystems running entirely different software and UIs. Recently Surface Hubs have been brought into the Teams Room ecosystem allowing for product synchronicity. At Ignite they made it clear they are doubling down on this. They announced a touch panel to control the Hub from the table. This finally brings the promise of the Hub being the all-in-one device to fruition.

Finally the Link. Talking to the people at the demo even they were surprised by how much attention Link was getting. This standalone device connects to Windows 365. That's all it does. Its simplicity is a huge selling point. Even if we're unsure what exactly we could use it for we're intrigued.

Aside from the announcements I got something else from this: reassurance. So many of the sessions we're discussing newer technologies and strategies. When it came down to it we were already using them. Truly we're operating ahead of the curve while other Microsoft customers are still fighting Windows 10 going EOL.