Microsoft knows that the days of their (or anyone’s) desktop OS dominating the marketplace is numbered. They know that people today are using multiple platforms on multiple devices and need interoperability between them. Slowly, but ever so surely, everything is being pushed to the cloud and the apps to access that data are available for all the main platforms. MS is moving away from selling standalone installations pushing you to Office 365. Google has their Chrome cloud and Android services, and Apple seems (I don’t pay much attention to Apple) to be moving more and more of their offerings into their cloud. This is where the market of the immediate future is so it makes sense for MS to do this Azure Sphere.

Look at what is happening in the world of commercial AI. There is a big battle brewing between MS, (we use one of Azure’s for research in our own work) AWS, and Google – all three making access to the massive AI engines they have built available to developers for free or low cost in order to bring them on board their clouds during development and then deployment.

For embedded design professionals (like me) go to EE Times and the other usual suspects for in depth details.