Microsoft has finally released some new marketing material that uses it’s anticipated “Be What’s Next” slogan. The material was found by Long Zheng fellow Microsoft enthusiast and then made even more popular by Tom Warren of WinRumors and Neowin fame. The marketing material spells out what Microsoft hopes for its software products to be now and in the future. Essentially, they hope for their customers to be the future, ahead of the game. Innovation is key at Microsoft right now, and this shows in many of their more recent products such as Azure, Kinect, and Windows Phone to name a few.
The video below (created by WinRumors) illustrates the innovation at Microsoft chiefly through Microsoft’s somewhat new Azure cloud service. Azure is an excellent example of how the cloud can be hugely beneficial to developers. What it comes down to is Azure allows developers/companies to easily develop products as they had always done (i.e. via Visual Studio), but then Microsoft hosts the applications in the cloud. Therefore, there are virtually no hardware expenses incurred in order to get the application out to the public or corporate wide. Servers are all hosted in the cloud along with your apps via Microsoft.
The “Be What’s Next” campaign also seems to focus on students and getting them interested and inspired by Microsoft products and services. What better time for Microsoft to start campaigning for these types of things than now? There’s a few T-shirts involved as well (which I could definitely go for one of them, especially the C++ shirt).
Tom Warren believes the “Be What’s Next” campaign is aimed towards consumers. Although I wouldn’t disagree with him on that statement, I would, based on the video Microsoft provided, argue that it’s aimed at businesses as well due to the Azure content that is heavily discussed in the video. However, as he also mentions, Windows Phone 7 is definitely a moving point for consumers.
The video stands at about 1:17 minutes in length, but is definitely worth checking out. Full credit goes to WinRumors for putting this video out on YouTube and to Long Zheng for initially finding the marketing material.
WinQuire 