Mainframes are, and will continue to be, a bedrock for industries and organizations that run mission-critical applications. In one way or another, all of us are mainframe users. Every time you make an online transaction or make a reservation, for example, you are using a mainframe.

According to IBM, corporations use mainframes for applications that depend on scalability and reliability. They rely on mainframes in order to:

• Perform large-scale transaction processing (thousands of transactions per second)
• Support thousands of users and application programs concurrently accessing numerous resources
• Manage terabytes of information in databases
• Handle large-bandwidth communication

Often when people hear the word mainframe, though, they think of dinosaurs. It’s true mainframes have aged, and one challenge the mainframe community faces is that they struggle to attract fresh developers who want to use latest and shiniest technologies.

Zowe milestones

Zowe, a Linux Foundation project under the umbrella of Open Mainframe Project is changing all that. Through this project, industry heavyweights including IBM, Rocket Software, and Broadcom came together to modernize mainframes running z/OS.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

The next batch of amiibo for the Super Smash Bros. line available today from all good retailers. Joining the roster are Piranha Plant, King K. Rool, and Ice Climbers, all of which will look rather lovely on your gaming shelf. Heck, you might even want to use the NFC functionality and train them up to be a formidable fighter. We won’t judge you if you just want to admire them for their looks alone, of course.

If you didn’t pre-order these, worry not. Various retailers are still taking orders today; below are your best bets for securing these potentially rare (one day, at least) amiibo.

Please note that some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale which helps support the site. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.

Piranha Plant amiibo

The Piranha Plant is an enemy in the Super Mario series with a round head and a mouthful of teeth that will pop out of a pipe when you least expect it. This one is a bit of a shock inclusion to the Smash line-up!

King K. Rool amiibo

King K. Rool is the leader of the Kremling Krew, who he repeatedly orders to steal Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong’s Banana Hoard. He also likes kidnapping Kong Family members while he’s at it. A nasty piece of work, but a fine amiibo for your shelf!

Ice Climbers amiibo

The Ice Climbers, Popo and Nana, are the stars of the NES game Ice Climber. These adventurers are equipped for even the coldest climates, and will make a fine addition to your amiibo collection.

amiibo stock has vastly improved since the scary early days, where literally no one’s orders were safe, but if you’re 100% sure that you want these figures it’s definitely worth getting your order in now, just in case.

Again, at the time of writing, King K. Rool and Ice Climbers are also available from Amazon UK for £14.99 each should you want or need a different option.

Make sure to let us know in the comments if you decide to snap these up!

Tetris 99 is, amazingly, the newest and freshest ‘Battle Royale’ on the block, T-spinning its way into a heated battle against the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends for world domination. Okay – it might not be in quite the same league as those gaming heavyweights – but it certainly brings an equal amount of fun to the table, and arguably even more challenge.

Facing off against 98 others players in real time is hard and, let’s be honest, the game really isn’t very good at telling you how to play. With that in mind, we’ve been practising like crazy to bring you this super-useful list of tips and tricks. What do the attacks in Tetris 99 do? How do you win? What even are the controls? We’ve got you covered…

The Basics of Tetris (and Tetris 99’s controls)

How To Play

Let’s kick things off with the basics (feel free to scroll on down if you already know how to play the main game). When loading up a game, you’ll see differently-coloured Tetriminos – blocks made up of different shapes – fall from the top of the screen. Your job is to rotate, drop, and carefully place these at the bottom of your screen to create full lines. Doing so clears that line from the board, and you can even clear multiple lines in one go with clever block placement.

In a usual game of Tetris, the aim is to simply survive for as long as possible, or get crazy high scores by clearing lots of lines or getting combos. Tetris 99 changes things up, however, as we’ll find out later on.

The Controls

If you’ve never played a game of Tetris before, or if you’re feeling a little rusty, you’re going to have a pretty hard time learning the basics in Tetris 99. Before jumping into a full match, make sure to memorise these controls:

• A/Y: Rotate Right – This will rotate your current, falling Tetrimino block to the right by 90 degrees.
• B/X: Rotate Left – This will rotate your current, falling Tetrimino block to the left by 90 degrees.
• L/R: Hold – This stores one block for later use, which can then be activated whenever you like by pressing the button again. Perfect for holding back tricky-to-place blocks, or saving an ‘I’ block to slot in at a later time.
• D-Pad Left/Right: Move – This will move your current, falling block to the left or right.
• D-Pad Up: Hard Drop – Pressing up will cause your current block to automatically snap to its destination. Once you’ve moved and rotated your block to where you like, press this to move on quickly.
• D-Pad Down: Soft Drop – Just like the hard drop, except this allows you to manually drop at your own pace.
• Left Stick/Touchscreen: Select target – The left stick and touchscreen allow you to manually pick an opponent to attack during the Battle Royale.
• Right Stick: Switch attack mode – The right stick toggles through the different attack mode options in Battle Royale (explained further down in this guide).

It’s also worth noting that you can switch the left and right stick options around in the settings, should you prefer them the opposite way around.

The ‘Battle Royale’ Twist

In Tetris 99, you’ll be playing against 98 other players in real time. Players can attack each other during the game, sending ‘junk’ lines to an opponent’s screen, and the last one standing after all the mayhem is declared the winner.

There are a surprising number of things to think about here, such as your attack, defence, and keeping an eye on what your opponents are doing. Hopefully, these tips will help you on your way to victory.

How To Send ‘Junk’ Lines

You can send ‘junk’ lines to opponents by clearing more than one line of blocks at a time (or sometimes even with just one if you’ve racked up combos or badges).

Clearing two lines will send one to your selected opponent; clearing three will send two, and clearing four will send four. Generating combos (successfully clearing lines with every block which falls from the top without a break) can add to these numbers.

What Are Badges And How Do They Work?

Badges add multiplier bonuses to your attacks, essentially adding to the number of lines you’ll send over to your opponent. Every time you wipe out another player, you’ll secure a portion of a badge, and you’ll also get any badges they were currently holding, too.

Reddit user Wiwiweb has managed to calculate exactly how these badges work. You can have up to four badges on you at any one time (the brackets below show how many badge portions you’ll need to make up that complete badge, and the attack bonus for owning each badge is shown afterwards).

• 1st badge: (2 badge bits) +25% lines
• 2nd badge: (4 badge bits, 6 total) +50% lines
• 3rd badge: (8 badge bits, 14 total) +75% lines
• 4th badge (maximum): (16 badge bits, 30 total) +100% lines

You can see how many badges you have just below your K.O. count. In this image below, we have one complete badge and are working towards a second.

How To Prevent Attacks

Sometimes, it feels like everyone is attacking you and there’s absolutely no hope in sight. Luckily, there is a way to monitor incoming attacks, and ways to deal with them.

Every attack sent your way will show up in a tall column on the side of your main screen, all as various coloured blocks. These pesky blocks are queueing up to throw themselves onto your main board, and will rise up from the bottom. They’re usually yellow to begin with, but will change to red and then an angry flashing red as time progresses. These colours indicate how soon the enemy lines will enter your screen – flashing red blocks will jump over when you’ve placed your next block.

When you have enemy blocks in this column, any ‘junk’ lines you send will actually fight against these blocks, rather than be sent to your opponent. If you see enemy blocks building up, you need to start clearing lines on your screen to clear them out – even clearing single lines delays the enemy block from entering your screen.

If you’re wanting to play defensively, it can help to save a block which can clear lots of lines with the L/R button, before deploying it as soon as your enemy block column starts to fill.

Which Attack Mode Should You Choose In Tetris 99?

As we’ve mentioned several times above, flicking the right stick allows you to choose from four different targetting or attack modes. These different options essentially target a different group of enemies from the other 98 players on your screen. Below, we explain how each of the four modes work and when best to use them – you’ll find that switching between them depending on your situation can often be the best way to play.

K.O.s (Right Stick Up)

The K.O.s option targets those who are currently in danger of seeing their blocks reach the top of their screen. By targetting these players, you theoretically have a higher chance of immediately claiming a K.O. when attacking them with ‘junk’ lines, gaining at least a portion of a badge in the process for multiplayer damage.

The problem is that, sometimes, a player will be wiped out before your ‘junk’ line attacks them, meaning you don’t get the kill or the badge reward. If you’re really wanting to go for kills, this isn’t a bad way to do it, but it can never be 100% reliable.

Badges (Right stick Right)

This option will target the player who currently has the most badges, allowing you steal them all for yourself should you wipe them out.

It’s worth noting that the player with the most badges is likely to be highly skilled, and could well be hard to beat. If they happen to be playing in ‘Attackers’ mode (below), this could also mean real problems for you, as their junk will be sent your way. We’d suggest ignoring this option until you’re feeling confident; switching to this mode towards the end of a battle can be a good way to assert your dominance and become the most powerful player on the field for the final 10 or 20, but it’s not to be used lightly.

Attackers (Right Stick Down)

Ironically, Attackers is probably your best defensive option, and will probably be the best friend of new players who are simply trying to survive for a decent length of time.

This mode targets those who are currently attacking you, and will actually split your attack across each of those players. This means that, by sending ‘junk’ lines their way, you can distract anyone trying to destroy your game and potentially take out multiple opponents at once. As your attack is divided between all of those attacking you, the number of lines sent to opponents will naturally be less per player, however, so getting kills isn’t as likely here.

Randoms (Right Stick Left)

As the name suggests, Randoms appears to select players at complete random. If we’re honest, this mode doesn’t seem all that useful in any scenario, and we’d suggest choosing one of the others (Attackers if you’re just starting out). Your attacks will buzz around from one player to another, hardly ever doing enough damage to completely wipe them out.

Manual (Left Stick/Touchscreen)

By using the left control stick or the touchscreen, you can manually select whichever of the other 98 players you like, sending all of your attacks their way. As you can imagine, this is quite an advanced tactic – keeping an eye on each individual player while clearing your own lines is incredibly tricky.

If you can manage all of this, though, then selecting players can be a good way to go. Perhaps you’d like to wipe out a strong player to claim their lovely badges, or maybe player number 87 just rubs you up the wrong way? If you’re a beginner, we’d ignore this feature for now, but it’s worth bearing in mind as you get better and better.

Tetris 99 Hints And Tips

• ‘Holding’ a long, thin block is always a good tactic if you’re looking to clear loads of blocks in one go, so don’t waste these precious commodities.
• While there’s always the temptation to rush and score as many lines as possible, remember that you’re not going for a score here. Sometimes, especially early on the game when the pressure is off, it pays to take things slowly and build up your blocks so you’re in a good position to clear them out once a long, thin block appears.
• Getting junk dumped on your screen isn’t much fun, but ironically, it can be the key to success. Dumped blocks have a thin gap which can be exploited if you have a long, thin block. It’s possible to send all those junk blocks right back at the person who gave them to you if you’re set to ‘Attackers’ mode.
• When the game speeds up, you need all the time you can get to really think about your next move, so don’t ‘Hard Drop’ pieces if you can help it. Instead, let them fall at their normal speed (which will still be pretty quick at this point) and use that additional second or two to glance at the block that’s coming next (shown on the right-hand side of the playfield) so you can plan where you’re going to place it.
• Switching to your ‘Hold’ piece is a good way to get out of a pickle, especially when the game gets faster. This is because switching to piece – even when your current piece is quite far down the screen – places the ‘new’ piece back at the top of the screen, buying you more time. The catch is that you can only switch to your ‘Hold’ piece once per drop.
• It’s possible to keep rotating your current piece even when it looks like it’s totally dropped – exploit this to get yourself out of tight spots and buy yourself time.

Hopefully, this guide has helped you to get a decent grip on the game and work towards those tasty victories. If you have any more tips, make sure to post them below in the comment section for other readers to see!

Also, if you’re wanting to learn even more about the game, make sure to check out our Tetris 99 review!

Do you want to know when a new version of your favorite project is released? Do you want to make your job as packager easier? If so, this article is for you. It introduces you to the world of release-monitoring.org. You’ll see how it can help you catch up with upstream releases.

What is release-monitoring.org?

The release-monitoring.org is a combination of two applications: Anitya and the-new-hotness.

Anitya is what you can see when visiting release-monitoring.org. You can use it to add and manage your projects. Anitya also checks for new releases periodically.

The-new-hotness is an application that catches the messages emitted by Anitya. It creates a Bugzilla issue if the project is mapped to a Fedora package.

How to use release-monitoring.org

Now that you know how it works, let’s focus on how you can use it.

First think you need to do is to log in. Anitya provides a few options you can use to log in, including the Fedora Account System (FAS), Yahoo!, or a custom OpenID server.

When you’re logged in, you’ll see new options in the top panel.

Add a new project

Now you can add a new project. It’s always good to check whether the project is already added.

Next, fill in the information about the project:

• Project name – Use the upstream project name
• Homepage – Homepage of the project
• Backend – Backend is simply the web hosting where the project is hosted. Anitya offers many backends you can chose from. If you can’t find a backend for your project, you can use the custom backend. Every backend has its own additional fields. For example, BitBucket has you specify owner/project.
• Version scheme – This is used to sort received versions. Right now, Anitya only supports RPM version scheme.
• Version prefix – This is the prefix that is stripped from any received version. For example, if the tag on GitHub is version_1.2.3, you would use version_ as version prefix. The version will then be presented as 1.2.3. The version prefix v is stripped automatically.
• Check latest release on submit – If you check this, Anitya will do an initial check on the project when submitted.
• Distro – The distribution in which this project is used. This could be also added later.
• Package – The project’s packaged name in the distribution. This is required when the Distro field is filled in.

When you’re happy with the project, submit it. Below you can see how your project may look after you submit.

Add a new distribution mapping

If you want to map the project to a package on a specific distribution, open up the project page first and then click on Add new distribution mapping.

Here you can chose any distribution already available in Anitya, fill in the package name, and submit it. The new mapping will show up on the project page.

Automatic filing of Bugzilla issues

Now you created a new project and created a mapping for it. This is nice, but how does this help you as a packager? This is where the-new-hotness comes into play.

Every time the-new-hotness sees a new update or new mapping message emitted by Anitya, it checks whether this project is mapped to a package in Fedora. For this to work, the project must have a mapping to Fedora added in Anitya.

If the package is known, the-new-hotness checks the notification setting for this package. That setting can be changed here. The last check the-new-hotness does is whether the version reported by Anitya is newer than the current version of this package in Fedora Rawhide.

If all those checks are positive, the new Bugzilla issue is filed and a Koji scratch build started. After the Koji build is finished, the Bugzilla is updated with output.

Future plans for release-monitoring.org

The release-monitoring.org system is pretty amazing, isn’t it? But this isn’t all. There are plenty of things planned for both Anitya and the-new-hotness. Here’s a short list of future plans:

Anitya

• Add libraries.io consumer – automatically check for new releases on libraries.io, create projects in Anitya and emit messages about updates
• Use Fedora package database to automatically guess the package name in Fedora based on the project name and backend
• Add semantic and calendar version scheme
• Change current cron job to service: Anitya checks for new versions periodically using a cron job. The plan is to change this to a service that checks projects using queues.
• Support for more than one version prefix

the-new-hotness

• File Github issues for Flathub projects when a new version comes out
• Create pull requests in Pagure instead of filing a Bugzilla issue
• Move to OpenShift – this should make deployment much easier than how it is now
• Convert to Python 3 (mostly done)

Both

• Conversion to fedora-messaging – This is already in progress and should make communication between Anitya and the-new-hotness more reliable.

Photo by Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash.

Your regular weekly update is back, and we’ve got plenty to catch up on – it’s been a pretty good couple of weeks all things considered, with some interesting new releases and game updates, as well as a healthy amount of sale action to see you into the weekend. For some of you in the UK it’ll be school holidays next week, so you may want to read this week’s update with interest.

Highlights from this week include catch-up reviews on The Escapists 2 (which is pretty good) and Invaders from Dimension X! (which is a bit rough around the edges, but a neat war game that we’re glad to see exist).

Meanwhile, in mobile games…

Out Now

Evolution (iOS Universal & Android) (Review)

There’s not much more to say about this game beyond what we stated in our review, so go give that a read. Suffice to say, if you like board games, there’s a high chance you’ll like this game. Better yet, you can try it out for yourself for free!

Knights of the Card Table (iOS Universal & Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

The art style on this one reminds me of our 2018 GOTY, Meteorfall and makes me wonder if the same artist was involved. This is a premium card game/dungeon crawler where players can re-arrange the dungeon cards themselves. Plenty of collectables and plenty of replayability by the sounds of things, and we’ll get you a full review as soon as we can.

Rebel Inc. (iOS Universal, Android) (Review)

One of our favourite strategy titles is now on Android! Woot! The pricing model is slightly different to what is on iOS, but it’s basically the same as Plague Inc. – you can try it out for free, and then there’s an IAP to unlock the ‘Premium’ version. There are additional IAPs beyond that, but these are exactly the same as what iOS users have.

From last week there was also text-based strategy game A Few Minutes of Glory (iOS), which we’ll have a full review for next week, as well as Throne Quest (iOS & Android), an action RPG that’s also on our list to take a deeper look at.

Finally, Victory Point Games released one of their solitaire board games in digital format called Gem Rush (iOS, Android). It’s an unfortunate title for the mobile app store, but we’ll get you a full review as soon as we can.

Updates & Pre-Orders

Star Traders: Frontiers (iOS & Android) (Review)
Templar Battleforce (iOS & Android) (Review)

The Trese Brothers have updated two of their catalogue recently – Templar Battleforce continues to get refined with improved iPad Pro support, and recently released Star Traders: Frontiers get a new content drop in the form of a new high-difficulty role and play-style. The link may be from steam, but it’s worth paying attention to the PC page because that’s where they talk about their plans and updates for the game (across all platforms).

Stardew Valley (iOS & Android) (Review)

The iconic farming simulator/RPG is finally making its way to Android. Pre-registration is open right now, so if you click on the above link you can sign up to notified when the game is released. The generally consensus is that it’ll be premium and cost the same as the iOS version, and also have all of the same functionality bar multiplayer. No news yet as to the ‘when’, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon.

Sales

There’s actually quite a lot of games on sale this week, so this section is going to have to be a bit brief:

• Hero Generations (Review) (iOS & Android): $0.99
• Transistor (iOS): $0.99 – cheapest price to date
• Age of Rivals (Review) (iOS & Android): $1.99
• Holy Potatoes! We’re in Space!? (Review) (iOS): $2.99 – only the second time it’s been on sale
• Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop!? (Review) (iOS & Android): $1.99 – only the second time it’s been on sale
• Potion Explosion (Review) (iOS & Android): $2.99 – not the cheapest price

Also available at a discount are Asmodee’s digital ports of Love Letter and Patchwork.

That’s everything in this week’s update – enjoy your weekends and we’ll see you next week. If you’ve seen anything else you think deserves as mention, let us know in the comments!

Linux isn’t just for developers. I know that might come as a surprise for you, but the types of users that work with the open source platform are as varied as the available distributions. Take yours truly for example. Although I once studied programming, I am not a developer.

The creating I do with Linux is with words, sounds, and visuals. I write books, I record audio, and a create digital images and video. And even though I don’t choose to work with distributions geared toward those specific tasks, they do exist. I also listen to a lot of music. I tend to listen to most of my music via vinyl. But sometimes I want to listen to music not available in my format of choice. That’s when I turn to digital music.

Having a Linux distribution geared specifically toward playing music might not be on the radar of the average user, but to an audiophile, it could be a real deal maker.

This bring us to Audiophile Linux. Audiophile Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution geared toward, as the name suggests, audiophiles. What makes Audiophile Linux special? First and foremost, it’s optimized for high quality audio reproduction. To make this possible, Audiophile Linux features:

• System and memory optimized for quality audio

• Custom Real-Time kernel

• Latency under 5ms

• Direct Stream Digital support

• Lightweight window manager (Fluxbox)

• Pre installed audio and video programs

• Lightweight OS, free of unnecessary daemons and services

Although Audiophile Linux claims the distribution is easily installed, it’s very much based on Arch Linux, so the installation is nowhere near as easy as, say, Ubuntu. At this point, you might be thinking, “But there’s already Ubuntu Studio, which is as easy to install as Ubuntu, and contains some of the same features!” That may be true, but there are users out there (even those of a more artistic bent) who prefer a decidedly un-Ubuntu distribution. On top of which, Ubuntu Studio would be serious overkill for anyone just looking for high-quality music reproduction. For that, there’s Audiophile Linux.
Let’s install it and see what’s what.

Installation

As I mentioned, Audiophile is based on Arch Linux. Unlike some distributions based on Arch, however, Audiophile Linux doesn’t include a pretty, user-friendly GUI installer. Instead, what you must do is download the ISO image, burn the ISO to either a USB or CD/DVD, and boot from the device. Once booted, you’ll find yourself at a command prompt. Once at that prompt, here are the steps to install.

Create the necessary partition by issuing the command:

fdisk /dev/sdX

where X is the drive letter (discovered with the command fdisk -l).

Type n to create a new partition and then type p to make the partition a primary. When that completes, type w to write the changes. Format the new partition with the command:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Mount the new partition with the command:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Finish up the partition with the following commands;

time cp -ax / /mnt arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash cd /etc/apl-files

Install the base packages (and create a username/password with the command:

./runme.sh

Take care of the GRUB boot loader with the following commands:

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Give the root user a password with the following command:

passwd root

Set your timezone like so (substituting your location):

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Kentucky/Louisville /etc/localtime

Set the hardware clock and autologin with the following commands:

hwclock --systohc --utc ./autologin.sh

Reboot the system with the command:

reboot

It Gets a Bit Dicey Now

There’s a problem to be found, which is related to the pacman update process. If you immediately go to update the system with the pacman -Suy command, you’ll find Xorg broken and seemingly no way to repair it. This problem has been around for some time now and has yet to be fixed. How do you get around it? First, you need to remove the libxfont package with the command:

sudo pacman -Rc libxfont

That’s not all. There’s another package that must be removed (Cantata – the Audiophile music player). Issue the command:

sudo pacman -Rc ffmpeg2.8

Now, you can update Audiophile Linux with the command:

sudo pacman -Suy

Once updated, you can finish up the installation with the command:

sudo pacman -S terminus-font pacman -S xorg-server pacman -S firefox

You can then reinstall Cantata with the command:

sudo pacman -S cantata

When this completes, reboot and log into your desktop.

The Desktop

As mentioned earlier, Audiophile Linux opts for lightweight desktop environment, Fluxbox. Although I understand why the developers would want to make use of this desktop (because it’s incredibly lightweight), many users might not enjoy working with such a minimal desktop. And since most audiophiles are going to be working with hardware that can tolerate a more feature-rich desktop. If you want to opt to go that route, you can install a desktop like GNOME with the command:

sudo pacman -S gnome

However, if you want to be a purist (and get the absolute most out of this hardware/software combination), stick with the default Fluxbox. I recommend sticking with Fluxbox especially since you’ll only be using Audiophile Linux for one purpose (listening to music).

Fluxbox uses an incredibly basic interface. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and a menu will appear (Figure 1).

From that menu, you won’t find a lot of applications (Figure 2).

That’s okay, because you only need one—Cantata (listed in the menu as Play music). However, after the installation, Cantata won’t run. Why? Because of a QT5 problem. To get around this, you need to issue the following commands:

sudo pacman -S binutils sudo strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag /usr/lib64/libQt5Core.so.5

Once you’ve taken care of the above, Cantata will run and you can start playing all of the music you’ve added to the library (Figure 3).

Worth The Hassle?

I have to confess, at first I was fairly certain Audiophile Linux wouldn’t be worth the trouble of getting it up and running … for the singular purpose of listening to music. However, once those tunes started spilling from my speakers, I was sold.

Although the average listener might not notice the difference with this distribution, audiophiles will. The clarity and playback of digital music on Audiophile Linux far exceeded that on both Elementary OS and Ubuntu Linux. So if that appeals to you, I highly recommend giving Audiophile Linux a spin.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

Microsoft has always had to straddle an arguably difficult position in the software trade. The company has always needed to appear technically intricate, granular and powerful in the eyes of hard-core software developers. At the same time, the company has always had to present its software to market with a user-friendly ‘anyone can use it’ out-of-the-box style and approach.

There’s a little of that duality in the firm’s latest power play, which is a combination pack of technologies wrapped up under the Microsoft Power Platform brand.

This is all about presenting a selection of heavyweight backend technologies to hard-core developers and data scientists, but also to would-be so-called citizen developers who are typically businesspeople with an interest in getting applications and data to work the way they want them to work.

CEO Satya: be cool (to others)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to explain to his developer team that it’s not always about being the most amazing software engineer that creates the next big thing. Instead, it’s about creating amazing software power and putting that power in the hands of people who need it.

“You join here [Microsoft, the company itself], not to be cool, but to make others cool,” said Nadella, in a comment that has been widely reported internally and officially referenced here on c|net.

What Nadella meant was: build something so amazing that it empowers other people. This, of course, is a platform play, not a product play i.e. he wants people to use Microsoft technologies to create something great, rather than use an existing Microsoft technology to be great per se. It’s a logical enough strategy i.e. software products come and go, but platforms are more foundational and expansive… and so (typically) form a better long term business bet.

Microsoft Power Platform

The component parts of the Microsoft Power Platform have all previously existed as more distinct entities. This is essentially a coming together of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as a more unified offering available on top of Microsoft Azure cloud services.

“Our Power Platform – spanning Power BI, PowerApps and Flow – enables anyone in an organization to start building an intelligent app or workflow where none exists. It is the only solution of its kind in the industry – bringing together no-code/low-code app development, robotic process automation and self-service analytics into a single, comprehensive platform. And it enables extensibility across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 as well as the leading third-party SaaS business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella, in a press statement.

So just looking at the component parts again and explaining their functions, we have Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Power BI is self-service Business Intelligence (BI) app that works to connect and analyze business data and present a graphical visualization of it on screen. It supports 43 languages and the data it ingests can come from an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or from an SAP or Salesforce application. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour.

Microsoft PowerApps forms the company’s citizen application development platform. Theoretically ‘anyone’ (says Microsoft) can use PowerApps to build web and mobile applications without writing code. There’s also a natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps so that users can put insights (from Power BI) in the hands of maintenance workers and others on the frontline in apps built using PowerApps.

Lastly here there is Flow. This is Microsoft’s user interface that allows users to work with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology designed to help automate simple tasks (and reduce operational errors) through automated workflows.

Data flows, everywhere

Corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business applications group James Phillips explains that the team’s vision for Microsoft Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.

“We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for [ordinary] people – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it,” wrote Philips, in a lengthy Microsoft cloud blog.

Philips and team say that the guiding vision for Microsoft Power Platform was a framework they called the ‘Triple-A Loop’ i.e. a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).

Why play platform games?

We might stand back and ask why Microsoft is so focused on its new and wider approach to platform games of this kind — and there are three fairly reasonable suggestions we can make here.

First, Microsoft has always done platforms i.e. Windows was and still is a platform and you run other things (apps, databases and other computing services) upon it.

Second, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Azure cloud platform (which features as a key element of Microsoft Power Platform) and, over and above that, the firm has for a long time now been working to make large portions of its stack (such as Office as a platform, which we detailed here in 2015) big enough to be considered platforms in their own right.

Third, Microsoft (under CEO Nadella at least) appears to understand the power of platforms both inside the Microsoft universe and outside of it. Be that other platform Linux, be it Android or be it a major vendor’s data platform suite from the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and so on.

This is a world where data comes first — sometimes from databases, sometimes from AI computations, sometimes from the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices and sometimes from actual users — even before the actual software applications that will feed on that data. That core fact very arguably makes any platform play strategically smarter for long term success… if perhaps not just a little cool too.