Microsoft to beat Amazon in the cloud according to ex-Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft office is well-positioned to beat Amazon in the cloud, according to Microsoft ex-CEO Ballmer. Furthermore, Steve Ballmer states that Microsoft has strong products I Office 365 and Azure, but competition against the web services of Amazon would be tough. Also, Google could challenge Microsoft Office 365. Ballmer keeps in touch with his successor Satya Nadella to provide product feedback. Microsoft is building out Azure, the first AI or artificial intelligence supercomputer. The existing Azure tools for ML or Machine Learning as well as cognitive computing would witness massive adoption because of the foray of the company into creating the AI supercomputer.

MICROSOFT’S CLOUD DIVISION STEADILY GROWING

While it is true that Microsoft is well-positioned, it has a lot of work to do. With Office 365 and Azure, the company has real shot but not a birthright. They have to push really hard with Azure against Amazon Web Services. Microsoft CEO from 2000 to 2004, Ballmer said that although Amazon is a direct competitor to Azure, it is Google that can challenge Office 365. Azure is the challenger with Amazon Web services. It only has one way to go, which is up. Office 365 has more ups than down and this is a Google risk. The cloud division of Microsoft has been steadily growing strong. Furthermore, it is an aspect that the present CEO has flagged as the future of the company. The cloud business of Microsoft brought about $6.86 billion in revenue during the second quarter. The revenue of Azure increased by 93 percent.

The Azure AI initiative has the potential of empowering Microsoft to challenge even IBM artificial intelligence via posing a considerable threat to the cognitive platform of Watson and business intelligence platform Cognos. With at present second to Amazon in the cloud, Microsoft could become one of the leading AI players. At the same time, the tech giant could be the number one cloud IaaS player, displacing AWS in a short time. The cognitive services APIs of Microsoft include APIs for speech, vision, language, knowledge and research. Also, ML APIs include key phase extraction, text analytics, language and topic detection and more would witness a growing demand from enterprise customers as soon as the company’s Azure supercomputer will come to the marketplace. In comparison, the AI tools of IBM may not see the same kind of demand. Why? This is because Microsoft would enjoy specific competitive advantages over IBM when its artificial intelligence supercomputer would be available for commercial usage. Microsoft is making its cloud business model flexible enough so it could address the following issues:

GLOBAL REACH. The company’s building a worldwide hyper-scale cloud infrastructure to cover nearly the whole world under its cloud network through using its datacenter presence in over 30 regions across the world.

DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY. Microsoft ensures that digital sovereignty needs as well as other compliance concerns in different counties are addressed properly so expanding its cloud network does not face unnecessary impediments.

HUGE DATA SUPPORT. When IoT goes mainstream, a big amount of data would be generated. The software giant is creating a distributes computing fabric that helps provide customers a flexible hybrid cloud model through Azure and Azure Stack to support huge amounts of data.

Microsoft, a US technology giant also has been targeting on hardware, pioneering new product categories such as the 2-n-1 tablet that’s called Surface. Recently, it announced the next games console, which is the Xbox Scorpio. The former CEO Ballmer said that he was very pleased with the progress with Surface line of products and the hardware division has also been nicely progressing. He is still a major shareholder but refused to reveal the amount of shares he holds. Nevertheless, he stated that he is happy at the current stock price that’s trading more than $65 per share and has seen over 17 percent growth in the past twelve months. Ballmer also reveale4d that he made several adjustments to his Microsoft holding last year to help his philanthropic work.

The tech giant has been able to leverage the popularity of its offerings to cross-sell its cloud software-as-a-service products. In the quarter, Microsoft has reported that the Office commercial products and cloud services income grew. The dynamic cloud services continue to report adoption growth, as clients continue adopting the ERP and CRM services, which deploy machine learning as well as intelligent cloud to glean insights to change how people work across sales, finance, customer service and marketing. With its ownership of LinkedIn, Microsoft indeed is in an extremely well positi8on to become a major player. It has monopoly on business social media niche or community. Furthermore, it has another advantage in its $27 billion free cash flow for the past twelve months compared to the $10 billion for Amazon. This is an integral metric since it represents the money that a company could pull together after capital expenses to do acquisitions or to invest to boost the business. The deal with LinkedIn is yet to play off, but Microsoft enters the four year under CEO Satya Nadella and is headed in a very stable direction lately. The stock hit an all-time high last October, which reflects the optimism of investors.

Facebook has given its marketplace a colorful redesign with visual overhaul

Facebook provides it Marketplace feature with a colorful redesign, providing it a bit of visual overhaul with colorful new icons and enhanced search and filtering features. First launched in October 2016, the Craigslist competitor is a major entry point of Facebook into local commerce. These days, the marketplace sits in a dedicated tab at the bottom of the application of Facebook application, wherein its ever-present red barge pressures one to click through.

 CHANGES WITH A COLORFUL REDESIGN

The changes in the Facebook account are more on making the marketplace easier to use, with a scrollable list of item categories, which look as rounded, candy-colored icons. During launch, the navigational elements of the marketplace were much simpler. Four buttons on the top encourage users to take a photo of an item to sell tap to categories, search or access their own postings easily. Same features are still available post-redesign, except that nowadays, delving into a single category just takes a single tap rather than two. The idea is to boost better discovery, since most people come to the marketplace with a goal in mind. They require a piece of furniture or appliance or want to browse for deals on items that are second-hand, such as purses, clothing, baby products or probably a used smart phone. With added individual category icons, one could now rapidly jump into a specific section. Additionally, in the front of the list, there is now a handy icon to find nearby garage sales.

Any section could be filtered by price and location to narrow the returned listings, with or without an accompanying keyword search. When browsing a given section, one could also tap the filtering options to switch to another category. These are categorized under high-level labels such as Entertainment, Home, Clothing and Accessories, Electronics, Family, Hobbies, Bicycles, Vehicles and Classified. Under each is a selection of sub-categories one could opt to narrow searches. For instance, under Electronics one could choose from Electronics & Computers or Mobile Phones. The Classifieds section feature has the Garage Sales and Housing Ads as well, both push FB further into Craigslist territory. Now, these sections too sport more colorful icons for maintaining consistency with the new look of the Marketplace. The features are available on Facebook’s desktop version and in mobile too but in a different layout.

Facebook has confirmed the launch of the redesign and states that it is now appearing to everyone with the Marketplace feature. The colorful redesign has bigger images, cleaner look and vibrant colors. The first difference noticeable is how the content within the News Feed is going to be more vibrant and bigger. The articles, photos, videos, maps, events and more all would stand out more and will be emphasized more. Another change you’ll see is more content feeds to choose from. This is in an effort to give us more control over the type of content we see in our News Feed. The feeds enable viewing certain kinds of content deemed most important, such as updates from all friends, photos, friends, and games and certain lists of brands or people followed.

FB’s marketplace could be used for listing what one has and what one wants within networks, group of friends or other networks. Beyond the use for classified listings, one could also use Marketplace to have a sense of everything desired or available within the networks. The listings in the Marketplace could be anything, from DVDs and books that are not needed anymore a dream job to land or special requirements. A listing could also be created for basically anything and one could easily keep track of connections to the others in the Marketplace. This means that next time one wants to purchase something, he or she could ask a mutual friend of the seller if she is the kind to scratch CS or allow a cat to have free reign over the sofa. As always one has thorough control over the privacy and the privacy of the listings as well.

The Marketplace of Facebook is a convenient destination for discovering, buying and selling items with people in the community. It makes it easy to look for new things one loves, find new homes for the things no longer used. Marketplace opens with new pictures of items, which people nearby have listed for sale. To find something in particular, search at the top and filter results by category, location or price. One could browse what is available in the different categories. The built-in location tool could be used to adjust the region that one is looking for or switch to another city altogether. FB wants to get into the local buying and selling game with the Marketplace. Furthermore, the colorful redesign of the feature makes it even more effective and simplifies the buying and selling process.