MPPC 2022 with Charles Lamanna

Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

James and I went down to sunny (sweaty) Orlando for Microsoft Power Platform Conference (MPPC) 2022. Apart from getting to see a great set of announcements, learn a ton, and meet up with past pod-friends we also got the chance to sit down and have a conversation with Charles Lamanna — hot on the heels of his keynote address.

Join us for this Very Special Episode of Switched On, our chance to share Charles’ deeper thoughts on MPPC 2022 announcements.

First, our own quick thoughts on MPPC 2022:

• James loved the enthusiasm. “Our industry is about to be turned upside-down.”
• I had big love for the announced collaborative editing feature in Power Apps, with coauthoring. Fusion teams are even more equipped now.

Then — in an effort to avoid falling into a nerd black hole of our own excitement — we jump to the live-on-the-scene interview with Charles.

IT. WAS. SO. AWESOME.

Here is a sprinkling of his wisdom.

Highlights

• Charles loves the real-time coauthoring experience, same as me. Customers often have big development teams working on the same app — now think of it as the current Word or Excel. Your colleagues are there with you, making cool things happen quickly.
• Power Platform as a low-code platform is interesting in its comprehensiveness. Don’t forget that you’re doing a lot more than just Power Apps.
• James notes the Azure backdrop for Power Platform as a game-changer: “substrate”.
• There are “no cliffs” — there’s always an escape hatch to go one layer deeper on customizing and powering up apps. You can always drop into a deeper layer of code or functionality.

Charles Lamanna

• Approximately 25% of Power Platform users are professional developers, and they often collaborate with non-pro devs.
• Fusion teams, CoEs, etc — those are functionally customer innovations on top of the delivered platform.
• 7.4 million Power Platform developers. It’s only just beginning.
• Low-code development platforms in 3 years: 3 trends. Data [there’s a massive amount of data from every system, it’s not easy to put it all together → data poor to data rich, connectors], AI [from big data to big AI, “there will be more UI built for AI than for humans”], collaboration [all this great stuff is happening in tech — it’s still all about the people using it].
• AI is leaking into Power Platform in ways where you don’t see or know it. It’s just there, powering things.
• We talk about humans collaborating, in the future it’ll be humans and AIs collaborating.
• Charles: serverless is the now-future.
• Fun fact: Logic Apps come from an internal hackathon project at Microsoft called Wolfkrow (“workflow” backwards)

Money Quotes

Charles

That’s the amazing thing about platforms: you build it, and your mind is always blown by what people are able to do with it.

Power Platform has definitely entered the ‘flywheel is a blur’ stage…every quarter there’s a game-changing experience. [nod to Jim Collins]

I remember in 2013 what it felt like for public cloud. It feels exactly the same way for low-code in 2022.

Technology is what enables the feature, technology is not the feature.

James

Because it’s getting to a certain level of maturity it’s like…how far can we take this? The answer is: pretty far.

Paul

MPPC 2023: Field of Dreams