Microsoft Programming Chief Julia Liuson: How We Moved From Windows Platform, To Any Platform

Microsoft's Julia Liuson: "Big open source projects like Android, Chrome and Java happen with a design process that is essentially behind the corporate wall -- we decided not to do that with our approach to open source and instead work with an 'inclusive design process' from the start for .NET and Visual Studio Code etc." Image credit: contentparty.org

A decade ago when Microsoft asked: Where do you want to go today? It didn't really mean we could go anywhere, in a truly open software sense of the term. They (it, the firm) really meant: Where do you want to go today within a Windows-specific 'proprietarily' closed platform of software using our applications, browser and tools? 

But that would have made a really shoddy marketing slogan.
Latterly, in an attempt to broaden, Microsoft moved on to use Windows Everywhere, but even this slogan has now become redundant. Today in late 2016, the firm has adopted a different tune and it is one of: Any developer, any app, any platform, at the software engineering and programming level at least, which ostensibly translates directly to the user level too.

Yes okay, obviously, Microsoft would still like all roads to lead back to Windows and its other platforms if occasionally possible -- Azure cloud, Office 365, .NET and its newer breed of cognitive services -- but something of a turnaround has occurred.

Turning the big ship around

A shift from focusing on proprietary platforms to embracing an open source approach doesn’t happen overnight and requires something much deeper than marketing slogans. The questions triggered by this big change are: how has the firm been re-engineering itself, what's life been like inside the big ship making the turnaround and can we see any holes in the argument it is now putting forward?

Julia Liuson is corporate vice president for Visual Studio at Microsoft and is responsible for developer tools and services, including all the firms programming languages and runtimes. In other words, she's the software boss at Microsoft.