One of two articles contrasting the strategies Canonical Ltd. and Microsoft are using to seed their respective operating systems across every platform ranging from phone to supercomputer. Read Maria Deutscher’s profile of Canonical’s strategy here.

Last month’s Microsoft Build Conference gave us the first close-up look at the company’s strategy to reassert its dominance in the computing world. Microsoft once had a seemingly unassailable lead on the desktop in the 1990s, but its leading position has long been eroded in numerous markets, eaten away by the onslaught of mobile phones and tablet devices. Linux’s growing popularity in scale-out environments is a threat to its market share in the lucrative server business.

To change all that, Microsoft’s pursuing a very simple strategy – run Windows 10 on everything, and makes its software available on every platform.

We’ve already seen the latter part of this two-pronged attack. Microsoft has dropped its insistence on running Windows in order to use any its software, and now flagship products like Office are available on both Android and iOS devices. It’s not just pursuing this strategy in mobile though – there are also versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s key application for programmers writing Windows software, for both Mac OS and Linux.

Extending that strategy, Microsoft last week released new tools that allow developers to tweak their Android and iOS apps to be able to run on the Windows OS. The idea is that developers can now create what will essentially be a universal app that can run on any platform with barely any code tweaking needed. It’s the Holy Grail for developers, and for a company that was once so ruthless in its quest to lock users into its own platform, a remarkable change of tack.

But why is Microsoft also pushing its “Windows everywhere” strategy – one that envisions its OS becoming the general purporse, broadly compatible platform for every kind of device? The answer is that Windows is slowly dying – its total share of the operating system market has slumped from more than 90 percent just a few years ago to just 40 percent now, according to some analysts. It’s a reflection of the trend (especially among consumers) toward mobile devices, where Microsoft’s Windows Phone holds a measly three percent of the market. Coupled with the successes of the Azure cloud infrastructure platform, Office 365 and the Xbox games console, its easy to see why Microsoft desperately needs a change of direction.

Universal Apps are key

“Universal apps” was the buzzword at Microsoft’s recent Build conference. Universal apps are essential if all the different versions of Windows are to be combined into a single stack. The idea is that developers simply write an app for desktops and it can also run on tablets, smartphones, X-boxes and even those weird holographic goggles, with just a few minor tweaks.

“We’re talking about one platform,” said Windows chief Terry Myerson. “A single app, a single binary that can run across all of these devices.”

Developers got their first taste of universal app deployment back in March when Microsoft released its first adaptive design and user experience tools, API contracts, Visual Studio tools and user controls. Then, at Build, Microsoft lifted the lid on its secret sauce – its Continuum technology that allows universal apps to scale to different client environments and screen sizes.

“In general we have a vision and an idea that the Windows platform and the apps written for it should be able to flex to different screen sizes and different input methods,” said Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft, during his keynote at Build. “Not by writing separate code, but by having a platform that’s smart enough to do it — in fact, even dynamically on the same device.”

Belfiore presented a simulation in which a Windows Phone was connected to a large-screen monitor via HDMI, plus a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to essentially replicate the desktop experience. In his demo, he showed how the simple UI of PowerPoint on mobile is blown up into the full size version as soon as the phone is hooked up to a larger display.

“What you see on the big screen here sort of looks like the version of PowerPoint that you would see on the PC,” said Belfiore, “because in fact it is the same code as the version of PowerPoint that you would download from the store and see on the PC.”

Microsoft hopes to get developers to build universal apps on its new Universal Windows Platform, which offers a common set of APIs for all the different versions of Windows. Developers apps are then compiled in such a way that the resulting binary can run on any Windows 10 machine.

Also at Build, Microsoft extended the universal apps theme by announcing plans to bring Android and iPhone apps to Windows 10. The idea is that developers can simply port their apps to Windows, but while it sounds simple enough, the actual process will be more complicated than that.

“Initially it will be analogous to what Amazon offers,” noted Myserson, referring to the way Amazon ports Android apps to run on its Kindle devices and smartphones. “If they’re using some Google API… we have created Microsoft replacements for those APIs.”

So Microsoft is suggesting that developers bring their code across without making too many changes, and then they can leverage Windows’ new capabilities like Cortana, Holograms, Live Tiles, Xbox Live and more. Microsoft has already been testing the concept with a handful of developers like King Digital Entertainment PLC, which has ported Candy Crush Saga to the Windows platform. The developer said the game was simply converted from iOS code without modification.

Big questions remain

Microsoft has a chicken & egg problem

Microsoft’s strategy could eventually result in thousands, if not millions, of new apps landing on Windows 10 in the not-too-distant future. If that did happen, it would make Windows an attractive option on smartphones and tablets, but that remains a big “if”. For one thing, even if Microsoft does succeed in making portability as easy as it suggests, there’s no guarantee that coders will actually want to port or build new apps for Windows Phone or the HoloLens.

It also remains to be seen how well ported apps or universal apps will actually work in the real world. Will an app built with the iPhone 6 in mind really work on a low-end Windows Phone? And while Microsoft’s universal app demos were thrilling to watch, writing apps to work for multiple devices isn’t nearly as easy as Microsoft makes it out to be, said one analyst.

“When they presented seemed like it was a case of ‘write once, deploy anywhere,’ and that’s definitely not going to work,” Avi Greengart, a research director for Current Analysis, told PCWorld. “And if you talk to Microsoft privately, they will tell you it won’t work, and they will tell you what they expect you to do is maintain a single code base, and to change it as needed for the different device form factors. If you design for an Xbox controller, it’s not going to work on a touchscreen.”

Another big question is whether consumers and developers will actually embrace Microsoft’s vision. In some ways Microsoft is still faced with the same old chicken-and-egg problem – developers aren’t interested in Windows devices while no one is using them, and people don’t want to use Windows devices if developers aren’t building apps for them. Microsoft is therefore trying to give things a kick start by making Windows free, but it’s not clear how much that will help it in mobile.

There are other questions too. For example, Microsoft has yet to announce an actual launch date for Windows 10, not to mention other versions of Windows, its app store hasn’t launched and no one knows how much the apps it houses there will cost.

Plenty of other technologies have struggled to bridge the gap between different devices. The World Wide Web, for example, did astonishingly well on laptops and PCs, but has largely taken a backseat on smartphones and tablets due to the popularity of apps. Now, Microsoft is trying to take hold of the app model itself to guide windows to a multi-platform future. It’s an enormous task, but if Microsoft wants Windows to prosper, it really doesn’t have any choice.

Read Maria Deutscher’s profile of Canonical’s strategy here.

Photo Credits: BUILDWindows via Compfight cc; GLady via Pixabay.com