At Build 2019 this week, Microsoft pushed its vision for “people-centric” computing, where the industry transitions from being focused on individual apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the like—to being focused on people. In many ways, the software giant has been working towards this goal for years, if not decades. It started with Microsoft Office, which evolved from a basic bundling of related applications to become an integrated solution in which functionality from one application could bubble up in another as the user created then-new compound documents.

Few remember this, but Windows 95 attempted to end the app-centricity of personal computing by offering a document-centric user interface in which the user could think “new document” instead of “I need to create a document, so now I need to remember which app I use for that type of document.” That we still struggle with this same issue today, in particular on mobile platforms—“I need to share a picture with my wife, so now I need to remember which app I will use, and where it is on this multi-screen grid of icons”—is unfortunate and even a bit sad.