In my 20 years in the workplace, like many techies around my age (41 and counting), I started off in the working world using various Microsoft OS's, with the odd dab of Linux/Unix here and there (usually in the 'server room'). Sometime later, along came the sea of change that was a radically improved Apple platform/hardware offering, which permeated the landscape and split many a tech camp.

Slowly but surely, for the past two or three years, I have found myself (having been one of 'those' Apple fanboys some years ago) coming back more and more to Microsoft platforms and hardware. Something that I never foresaw.

In the past few years, it's fair to say that Microsoft has been doing something quite clever, quite under the radar, but in many ways, done right in front of us. It has most definitely improved its OS, recent physical products are excellent (I love my Surface Pro 4), and platforms/services such as Azure are very good.

However, it is everything focussed on people working together where Microsoft has been so clever and so innovative in my opinion. Because of this strategy, Microsoft will play a much larger part in the modern work environment than its doubters would like to believe.

What do I mean?

Sometime around 2014, Microsoft really started to understand just how important and crucial workplace collaboration is (and will be). It understands the current, emerging and modern workplace - and how we will continue to work evermore in disparate teams - better than any of their competition. Not just in terms of technology, but in all aspects of working. More importantly, Microsoft decided to do something with the knowledge it gained - on an industrial scale.

Slowly but surely, over the past few years, Microsoft has been pulling more and more people deeper and deeper into its ecosphere of products and services - in ways that it will be very hard for people to leave once embedded. This can only have been done if the products are good enough and help people to be more productive and collaborative. No tricks have been used and it is certainly no fluke.

Unlike others, Microsoft has strategically built a way of tying together its ever-less-so disparate services - tighter and tighter - so that these services are so intrinsic, so useful to the modern workplace, that they create an environment where people can effortlessly work together, collaborating in a way - and on a scale - that the human race has not yet encountered.

Several large players are espousing "cloud working this...", "collaboration that", yet in the main, they have cobbled together suites of very disparate software/apps that don't actually work that well together at all. Lots of mud is being thrown at the wall to see what sticks, yet there is little evidence that there is a holistic collaboration strategy at play. Collaboration seems to be a hope, rather than something thought through.

"Collaboration" is such an easy word to throw around, and in most cases, the service/app/software that the word is referring to offers nowhere near the level of collaboration that we will be expecting and needing over the next few years in the workplace.

Microsoft, the collaboration & productivity company

Looking at the excellent '12 Principles of Collaboration' graphic (from 2012) by the prescient collaboration expert, Jacob Morgan, you can see what Microsoft have been doing fits very well into each of the principles.

I'll stick my neck out and predict that there will almost be a 'second coming' of Microsoft, one where people realise just how insightful and innovative they were to see the road ahead, but also tenaciously built their services in such a way that they will stay ahead of the game for some time.

In the not too distant future, I don't think that Microsoft will be seen as the tech/OS giant that it is today, but as the company that got the world working in ways that are so much more productive than we ever thought possible. You could say that the 'operating system' of the future is how we work together, rather than that thing we install programs on today. This is where Microsoft's head is at, I believe.

However...at the moment it can be VERY clunky

Microsoft's collaborative efforts at the application level are far from perfect. Currently, in several areas, Microsoft may not have the better product compared to a competitor (e.g. its forms product), but as a whole ecosystem of collaboration, they get modern working to a much greater degree than anyone else. As more products and services are released/improved, such as the excellent Surface range - from Surface Pro, Book to Surface Studio to Surface Hub - or Office 365, or various cloud services/products, you can see how they will all tie in, tighter and tighter to each other in the future.

An example of clunky application is online use/multi-user editing/sharing of Office 365 documents. I much prefer the simplicity of Google Docs over Microsoft Word in Office 365. While Word is better than Google Docs in single user mode, try editing an Office 365 word document from multiple locations, browsers or platforms and you will find that it becomes nightmarishly unusable, with many unstable changes made just by loading a document from a different platform. This is just one of many examples, but improvements are happening all the time.

The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration." - Tim O Reilly

Underestimation of the need for collaboration

Despite being way ahead of the competition, Microsoft actually massively underestimated the thirst for collaboration in the workplace.

One example of this is the demand for its Surface Hub product (see above). There are literally none left in the UK (and I think this is the same for the US). They are in huge demand, yet there won't be any more Surface Hubs available for some time yet. Microsoft has had to move production from the US to China to scale for the demand.

Instead of customers purchasing a few Surface Hubs each, some have bought hundreds of the machines, with some larger companies buying over 1500. Not bad for something that can cost over £20,000!

"When you need to innovate, you need collaboration." - Marissa Mayer

Surface Hub alone has very quickly become a billion dollar a year business. And this is version one! This is just the tip of the tip of the collaboration iceberg that Microsoft foresaw - and indeed underestimated. This makes it all even more exciting.

Collaboration + Egalitarianism = Rapid Innovation

In my own working life, I have spent much time trying to understand how innovation can be improved per head within a business. By far the most important thing for innovation to thrive and problems to be solved, I have found, is egalitarianism (and so does NASA). Where meetings/discussions around problems and solutions are not dominated by one or two people (usually someone of high authority) is where real innovative thoughts seem to thrive and problems solved at rapid rates.

And this all fits the model that Microsoft is building. By providing a collaboration ecosphere, mainly through tightly-tied services/apps/software via the browser, they are also creating somewhat of an egalitarian framework for everyone to work from. Using a browser on one computer in England is very similar/exactly the same as working using a browser somewhere in deepest, darkest Peru. No difference in experience means a more level playing field, rather than a playing field determined by hardware power and software options.

As Microsoft products improve, and as computing power and internet speed improves, collaboration will improve greatly among employees and between companies, leading to greater levels of innovation across the world of working. Exciting times.

The future is bright, full of collaboration and improved productivity

I believe that Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, may well be seen as the brains behind one of the greatest changes of work culture and human productivity in history in the years to come, should individual Microsoft services match the mindset, innovation, and tenacity of the company as a whole to get workplace collaboration right.

We are at the very beginning of understanding what workplace collaboration looks like. Indeed, I have naturally used the word, 'workplace' several times in this article - but is that the correct word to use? It certainly won't be in the future.

Will the 'workplace' be somewhere that some people go just one day a week/month? Will we need a new word for our work environment(s)? As we become much more collaborative with our colleagues, terms like 'working from home' won't do it either - as it probably won't feel like we are working from home.These are all things that Microsoft are understanding and taking on with vigour. If you think that Microsoft is a giant now, what they will become will be truly astonishing.

"I believe that collaboration is one of the most important things in any field." - Jonathan Anderson

#microsoft #collaboration #innovation #productivity