[Athen] Slightly OT: A concern for the future of Windows-based AT

[Deborah Armstrong]

Bloomberg has an interesting story about Amy Hood, Microsoft's CFO.

One business trend for this past decade is that a CFO is no longer a glorified accountant/budget analyst. They are now part of the senior management team - determiners of strategy rather than implementers. Microsoft' Q4 earnings report came out Thursday and according to Bloomberg, investors are saying Ms. Hood is the best CFO Microsoft has ever had.

One thing she's done is take money away from legacy divisions and put it in to the cloud. Since 2002 when she was hired her goal is to move Microsoft more towards cloud-based subscription models for their products - I'm paraphrasing Bloomberg here-previously most divisions could ask for what they wanted budget-wise and could expect to get it - that's no longer true.  Bloomberg also comments that Ms. Hood timed her start date back in 2002 to get maximum access to the employee stock purchase plan.

So despite what we see at conferences with Microsoft's waving of the accessibility banner, I don't think it's going to be smooth sailing ahead. If it doesn't improve growth it's going to be ignored.

The earnings reports no longer say anything about Windows, so we can assume it is gradually going to just be a framework for a browser; already most new apps are PWAS (progressive web apps) which means no installation, no data on your own PC, but you need to be online to access any of it.

This means that AT is going to need to get much better at dealing with progressive web apps and other online offerings. For keyboard users, there is no longer a consistent, reliable set of keystrokes for operating web-based applications. For screen reader users, just to take one example, pressing Tab can take you out of the application and in to the address bar which is very confusing; imagine if a single and frequently used keystroke could dump you out of the operating system! For magnification users, the lack of standards in a web-based interface means that you can miss important information because you weren't looking in the right place.

The full Bloomberg story is here:
                https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-16/how-amy-hood-won-back-wall-street-and-helped-reboot-microsoft

--Debee


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