In this post, I’ll drill a bit into the final of the 3 areas SRT is investing in for 2013: Continuous Client Experience.
Users are now expecting that their experience, their work, and their data follows them from one device to the next. It’s not enough to have a presence on mobile, web, and desktop. It’s important that users have a seamless experience as they move from one device to the next.
One high profile example is Netflix. I can start a movie on my laptop. When I get home, I can switch to my Roku and have the movie pick up in exactly the same location. My picks are the same on my phone as on the living room device. We just expect that experience to move from device to device.
OneNote provides similar behavior as a productivity application. My notes automatically sync in the cloud. As I move from machine to machine, or to my phone, all my data just follows. The newest version of OneNote doesn’t even have a “save” command. My work just moves to the cloud on a regular basis.
All the applications we are now writing for business users demand the same kind of synchronization. It’s driving several design decisions.
We’re putting data in the cloud, where it’s accessible from multiple devices. We’re putting more effort into how we synchronize data. We’re putting thought into server side data crunching and client side rendering. We’re designing applications that have more and more of their algorithms in the cloud. That lets us develop more and more of the functionality for a single server platform. Each client has a smaller footprint and less device specific code. That lowers the cost of creating a great experience on each device. Finally, we’re investing in making great offline experiences that synchronize data when the device notifies applications that a network is available.
Put all these areas together, and we believe we’re well positioned for an exciting 2013. There are major shifts underway in our industry, and we intend to stay at the forefront.
