Microsoft recently revealed that it’s officially ending Internet Explorer (IE) with the launch of Windows 10.
IE will be replaced by the streamlined new Project Spartan browser.
Many will not miss IE, and maybe sceptical that Project Spartan is anything more than IE with a new coat of paint.

However, the one thing Project Spartan really needs to capture market share has little to do with the browser itself: it just needs to be cross-platform.

Microsoft has already conceded the cross-platform war. Its recent strategy of offering OneNote, followed by the full Microsoft Office productivity suite, on iOS and Android mobile devices has been effective. Last week, it added its Office Lens app for iOS and Android to extend the ability to scan documents and whiteboards from a mobile device on rival platforms. It needs to adopt that same all-inclusive mindset with Project Spartan.

Project Spartan cannot be a Windows-only browser like IE. Microsoft needs to make Project Spartan for Mac OS X, Project Spartan for iOS, Project Spartan for Android–maybe even Project Spartan for Linux. Much of the value of a browser today lies in the ability to open a tab in the browser on your PC and pick up where you left off from your smartphone while you’re on the go.

People expect tabs, bookmarks, and even logins and passwords to be seamlessly synced.
People want a browser experience that remains consistent no matter on which device or platform they’re working.

IE once enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the browser market. Firefox and Chrome–and to a lesser extent Apple’s Safari–have eaten away at that dominance. IE still has more market share than all of those rivals combined, but its 90+% market share dwindled to just over 50%. Even that figure is debatable, because it depends on how you measure the browser market. There are metrics that suggest Chrome is more popular than IE.

Part of that is driven simply by the browser itself. Firefox and Chrome both have, dynamic ecosystems of extensions and plug-ins that enable the browser experience to be customized and to be more powerful than the off-the-shelf browser itself.

IE also has add-ons available, but they’ve never had the loyal following of Firefox and Chrome.

IE has had its share of security and performance issues. With IE, there has been a sustained campaign of negative marketing and media attention. An entire generation hates IE and refuses to use it, and they don’t even really know why. They just know that everyone says you should avoid IE.

Project Spartan can help Microsoft start fresh. It can reinvent the Microsoft browser as a more flexible and efficient browser experience. It can shed the negative stigma of the IE brand. It will all be for nothing, though, if Microsoft doesn’t also make Project Spartan available as a cross-platform browser that enables users to keep tabs and bookmarks synced and remain productive as they switch from Windows PC, to iPhone, to Android tablet.

It’s a multi-device, cross-platform world. Project Spartan needs to recognize that, or it’s DOA.

Microsoft’s flagship operating system operates quite differently from Linux—which looks to be be a problem as containers become the preferred way of computing in the cloud. Microsoft is reshaping Windows. Last year Microsoft announced that it would add Linux-like container technology to a future version of Windows. Now, the company has revealed that it’s also developing a super-slim version Windows Server Nano.
that will run what it describes as a new kind of container that provides an added level of security.

According to Microsoft spokesman Mike Schutz, the company is building a way of wrapping containers in its Hyper-V “virtualization” technology, so that they’re completely isolated from each other.

But the real news seems to be that Microsoft will offer a stripped-down operating system along the lines of CoreOS, a Linux operating system that’s particularly suited to running containers across a large number of computers. This kind of operating system represents the future of online services, which necessarily run on hundreds or even thousands of machines—or what industry marketers like to call the cloud.

Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is revamping its technologies to suit the way the world is moving. Today’s Windows is such a large operating system that you need time to deploy it across many machines. In an age when you can so easily push Linux operating systems like CoreOS onto a vast array of computer servers, Windows is behind.

So its important that Windows Server Nano will offer containers to provides a way of encapsulating software so that developers and businesses can more efficiently move these containers from machine to machine, and also squeeze many of these onto the same machine, to take advantage of unused computing power.

The added security Microsoft provides with its “Hyper-V containers” is something that will appeal to only some organizations, such as government agencies that have extreme security requirements. Some agencies may need a way of tightly securing individual containers because they’re running alongside containers from other agencies. Regulations often require agencies to maintain complete software separation.

Many organizations now run containers atop public cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and that means they end up sharing computers with each other – containers run atop virtual machines, which provide the needed security.

The Hyper-V containers don’t make much sense in this situation—a situation that represents the future. But Microsoft must also appeal to a wide range of businesses, including government agencies. It must serve a new audience without losing the old one.