When Microsoft first started, Bill Gates had a vision, “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Today, we’re no longer bound by the desk, or even a single machine. You can now choose between smartphones, tablets, laptops, or the trusty desktop – and even televisions and cars are becoming connected devices. To remain competitive, businesses are faced with addressing this duopoly of enabling work across devices, while building engaging format-agnostic content for customers.
With 60 institutions of higher education in the metropolitan area, Boston may be one of the best cities in the world to showcase the potential for businesses from today’s multi-screen society. Schools including MIT, Harvard, and Boston University, make high-technology research and development a bit of a regional specialty. And local businesses often benefit from this, serving as real world labs to develop, test and refine new technologies.
Take for example medicine, one of our area’s proudest industries. Today, emergency responders are able to upload images, vitals and critical health information from the field via tablets to ER doctors, enabling them to prepare before the patient has even arrived at the hospital. Similarly, mounted TV screens can serve as a tracker for lab work ordered by doctors, linking directly to a cloud-based system, which gets real-time updates from technicians, allowing nurses to better manage the status of each patient. Even patients benefit from a connected system, using mobile applications to access medical records, manage health conditions and share real-time updates with their doctors.
All of these features are enabled through the use of multiple platforms, device types and operators working together in harmony. This is the future that exists not only for healthcare, but also for manufacturing, business operations, finance, and industries of every shape, size and type. We understand the potential of technology and have committed ourselves to building an ecosystem that is not limited by screen size, operating system, or audience. We’ve released Universal Apps, which sync across smartphones and PCs, and eventually Xbox, as well as our new Enterprise Mobility Suite, a comprehensive solution designed to help IT professionals manage differing devices and environments from one simple suite of tools.
Facing this new multi-screen environment head-on will enable businesses to better target consumers and leverage worker productivity from anywhere, in any situation; and we are dedicated to bringing the best possible solutions to market in the Boston area. Stay tuned for future posts on the multi-screen environment, but in the meantime, see how the Microsoft Cloud is helping businesses prepare for tomorrow’s technological potential.