Each year, Kinetik I.T. Software Development Manager and Microsoft Access MVP, Tom van Stiphout, attends the Microsoft MVP Summit. His takeaway in this conference shares some insight into Microsoft's successful products.
For me reading the tea leaves at MSFT is mostly about momentum. It's a company that undertakes major initiatives and responds to its customers. Not all products make it. There are trial balloons, and failures to ignite.
Azure is one of those major initiatives, and it is growing in reach almost every week.
PowerApps is one of those
products with momentum. It just reached General Availability status (GA) but
that's just the beginning. It has synergy with the rest of the Power platform
including PowerBI (another product with lots of momentum) and Flow. It will be
able to connect to the new Common Data Services on top of Azure as well as most
if not all data sources PowerBI can use, and new ones are coming online all the
time. I'm going to closely watch this product, get to know it, and maybe in 6
months or so we can use it to build simple task-driven applications that run on
any device. First only in our tenant, but if customers are asking for it …
The Access desktop
application also has some momentum behind it. It is far from dead. It just got
added to several more flavors of Office 365. If I read the tea leaves correctly
we will see it being able to connect to some of the same modern data sources.