RedMonk’s James Governor and Kate Holterhoff sat down at Fort Mason to give their take on Microsoft Build 2026. Their first impression: Microsoft shrank the event and aimed it squarely at developers, borrowing a lot from GitHub’s playbook. The keynote ran two and a half hours and packed in plenty. They dig into the new GitHub Copilot app, which pulls coding, agents, and a live canvas into one place so developers stop hopping between tools. Flow got real stage time too, with Microsoft pitching a calmer workspace free of pop-ups and Clippy-style nagging. On hardware, there’s a communicator with facial recognition and new Surface laptops due in the fall. Then there are the models, and there are a lot of them. Microsoft showed local Aion models plus seven new MAI models, with Mustafa Suleyman claiming they beat everything out there. James and Kate stay skeptical until they can kick the tires themselves, ideally with Simon Willison’s pelican-on-a-bike test.

This RedMonk video is sponsored by Microsoft.

Links

• build.microsoft.com

Transcript

James Governor (00:02)
Hi, I am James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. This is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. Hello. And we are here to give us our reckons about Microsoft Build 2026. So this is a quick take. We’re just going to say some of the things we found interesting about the event. We are here. It is a beautiful day in Fort Mason in San Francisco. I think the first thing that I thought was sort of quite noticeable, because Microsoft the fact that they sort of made the event smaller and more intimate. That was a focus for them and more developer.

Right. there was clearly a decision that they wanted to make it look more like a GitHub event and I think they have succeeded. So the first thing I have noticed is that it’s just felt quite sort of GitHub y and developer-y. Yeah. That was my first takeaway. Kate, what have you been noticing in the keynote and everything else?

Kate Holterhoff (00:49)
yeah, absolutely. Well so the keynote was pretty cool. They had us pretty close to the front and so I was able to, marvel at all the the wonderful videos that they were playing and we had the CEO front and center, where where we were able to, l check out all of his pores or whatever.

I kid No, it was it was great. we had a lot of announcements. I was super interested in a lot of the hardware stories. I mean there were all these interesting devices that they were premiering. Sorry, I know. I can’t help it. I feel it feels it feels like the right story.

James Governor (01:21)
Do you

want one of those like Qualcomm communicator Star Trek?

Kate Holterhoff (01:25)
Yes, I

do. I do. I want to have the little my lanyard here that kind of snaps back. I mean it was it was neat. He’s you know he’s he’s got the the camera inside of it. I like the facial recognition, because I don’t want to be typing in codes. I mean this is I feel like we’re we’re we’re post remembering four digit code. So this is you know I I I’ve moved beyond it. I don’t know if the rest of the world has. Anyways, so I I enjoyed that. It was very cool. also my God, yeah, the GitHub app. I mean that’s gonna be pretty cool too. So, having a way to you have an IDE that is

is integrated, allows for the agentic experience that is not gonna be I don’t I don’t know that we’re not you know having to access it via the browser all the time. so

James Governor (02:04)
IDE?

I I think it’s sort of almost like a an IAE. It’s an integrated agent express.

Kate Holterhoff (02:09)
Well they you know that they led with the idea of being an app. An app. So you know, I I I feel like maybe the the naming is they’re they’re still maybe working out the kinks there because yeah, when I think of some some of the other desktop apps that that I am using in order to leverage my own agents when I’m when I’m programming. yeah, there that that seems to be the way of things. So anyways, but they’ve kind of a a neat approach some of the ways that you’re gonna be able to condense chats and and be able to to search for what

you don’t have the actual context that you’re looking for, you know, seems seems worthwhile and is tied to what you were saying about it it feeling more like a developer conference which GitHub who has had their own conference here at at Fort Mason in the past has been doing for years.

James Governor (02:53)
Yeah. So I think the app is is gonna be really interesting.

If we think about yeah, the the the the the one thing that you want is is is a single context. You don’t want to constantly go one place to another to check what the agent’s doing, going into a different GitHub environment, looking at that repo, doing all of this stuff. So bringing all of that together, so regardless of where you are in the process of development, and of course you’ve got the canvas so that you can actually look at the app and get that feedback. Right. I do think that that that that that notion of of of of integrated

agent environment. i it’s it’s probably time for that. And it does make sense that GitHub Copilot app sort of would be the place that happened.

Kate Holterhoff (03:35)
Yeah. For sure. I know. Flow seemed to be front and center for a lot of the announcements. Yes, right. Absolutely. I know. That was I know, that’s my favorite example. We’ve had it demonstrated to us several times. But anyway or a topic. It’s back. There we go. so so you know. But maybe more importantly for this, you’re able to silence a lot of the distractions. So making sure that that you don’t have like pop-ups coming up or

James Governor (03:40)
Flow, yes.

You can have it to the side. I know.

having me there. It’s calm. I’m not James, it’s not tapping on my shoulders.

Kate Holterhoff (04:12)
I have a question. I wanna tell you a story.

James Governor (04:15)
Yeah,

you ready? Okay. So it’s a calm environment where that doesn’t happen.

Kate Holterhoff (04:20)
Yes, yeah, so hopefully at least your desktop you’re having a calm environment. but yeah, I mean that’s how it kind of goes back to the hardware thing, right? We got we today were we’re introduced to some of the new surface laptops coming out in the fall. And yeah, again, like having this experience for developers where they are trying to strip away a lot of the distractions that can can come in when folks are trying to get into that flow state.

James Governor (04:43)
Yeah, I think that’s important. Devs don’t like Clippy. They don’t want that, they don’t want the copilot in their face all the time. so yeah, you know, just thinking about how do we have some default configs, Windows 11 that will help developers be more productive. And on that note, there’s just there’s just a bunch of stuff that you know that Microsoft they’ve been on this jour journey to try and make their hardware a a more attractive dev platform. So, you know, things we’ve seen in terms of announcements, further improvements.

with WSL, Windows Services for Linux. So if you’re a Linux user, it feels like an environment you’re used to. They’ve got better support for Linux commands. That’s super important because you don’t want to go in and be like, this is my Linux environment, but I can’t grep. That’s ridiculous. So they’ve been fixing some of that stuff.

And then I think the other thing that they’re working on is these Windows execution containers. So sandboxes. Everybody is every 2026, people say it’s the year of the agent. No, no, no, it’s the year of the sandbox. Absolutely. There are so many sandbox platforms. So obviously, Microsoft has to have a Windows-based sandbox execution environment. So when you’re using agents on on Windows, it doesn’t do bad things. And I thought it was interesting, they immediately leaned into the why don’t you delete all

The files on the desktop. And it was like, no, we’re not. Scott Hanselman. Scott Hanselman, so funny, so good. Here you go. But I mean, Scott, to be fair, look, I mean, this is a guy that he spends a lot of time using technology to manage his glucose levels as a diabetic. and one of the first questions I asked him like a few months ago was like, wait, you’re not gonna use OpenClaw for this. He’s like, Look, James, OpenClaw can be secure in the way I want to secure it. And some of the those sort of thoughts, that’s what they’re trying to do with Windows and making that

a native thing. Yeah. James. Yes. Models. We have we haven’t talked about the models yet. So honestly there’s a lot of models. We’ve got the we’ve got the Mythic Quest (Ian Grimm, IYKYK) Aion models.

Kate Holterhoff (06:35)
We haven’t talked about the models.

There’s so many models.

My God. Yes.

James Governor (06:46)
Yeah, that’s

so and there was so much news. Like we got these we got these local models, it’s gonna be amazing. Okay. Token efficiency. Yes. Big deal. The best to the best token that you well the best the best token y you burn is just not burning a token. The second best one is burning it locally. The one in your pocket. That’s right. The one in your Qualcomm device. That’s a good token. So don’t burn all the tokens. use your your Aion local models. It’s gonna be interesting to see people do you know, some of the things like transcription, maybe some of those code. I I think that it is true.

Right.

We can’t always be shoveling our cash into anthropic and OpenAI OpenAI’s pockets. Because they’ll just burn it anyway. So, you know, we should probably think about token efficiency. That was a big theme. so that it not just not just the Aion models though, they introduced the MAI on Microsoft AI models. That’s Which Mustafa Suleyman if we’re to believe how good these are, he was like, these are the best models you have ever seen. Like if they’re that good, then today we’re it’s a new industry. Yeah. It is a new industry.

OpenAI will be like, dear. Microsoft I mean, except Microsoft invested so much in OpenAI, it’s getting sick. Anyway, this is getting dangerous. This is. But yes, the up and down the stack, that’s the point the real thing I want to comment on. So Microsoft now has its own models, trained on its own chip architectures.

In the cloud, they are in control of their costs in a way they were not before. So we think about the hyperscalers, you know, got Google over there and they you know they are a full stack player. Microsoft at this Build was very much like we have AI capabilities up and down.

stack. And I think if they have competitive frontier models, it really is a big, big change. So we’ll hear from developers, it’s very early, models are just dropped. If people start saying this is competitive with what we get from Anthropic and OpenAI, yes, that is going to be absolutely huge for Microsoft and the industry at large.

Kate Holterhoff (08:41)
Yes.

I mean a lot of folks who are following the AI space have benchmark fatigue for sure. And I I definitely felt the weight of that of like, okay, you’re telling us these are gonna be good. So kicking the tires is gonna be a big part of this. Which model are you most excited to kick the tires on? Speech to text, you know? I don’t even know. You don’t even know. Okay, I’ll tell you which one I am. Images. I still struggle with a lot of the different models that are are

James Governor (08:57)
Yeah, that’s cool.

Let my daughter see

this show now. Because if she knows that we’re using AI to generate images, I’m in I’m in

Kate Holterhoff (09:12)
She’s right

right now, they do not work as well as I as I would like.

James Governor (09:16)
We’re gonna we gotta see Simon Willison, we gotta see what it does with a Pelican riding a bike. And then we’ll know if it is good.

Kate Holterhoff (09:22)
Okay. The the only benchmark that we care about at RedMonk is pelicans on bikes.

James Governor (09:27)
And you know,

one shotting your app.

Kate Holterhoff (09:31)
I believe in one shotting. I said it here. This is lots lots to be explored in the coming months as these things are released, GA, whatever. but I mean yeah, the seven MAI models. Are they pronouncing it my or A I?

James Governor (09:47)
I think it should be my,

but they are calling it MAI because they’re Microsoft, they love TLA, so you know it’s I think I think I think my is better, but you know that’s why they pay us the medium sized bucks instead of the Microsoft size ones. So anyway, a lot of news, a lot to digest. it was it it honestly was like a two and a half hour keynote, very information dense. they had to throw in talking about quantum, which I do not care about at the moment very much. you’re wrong about that. But I’m all in. You’re all in?

Kate Holterhoff (10:15)
Yeah, absolutely.

James Governor (10:18)
I mean plus

quite okay okay there you go. This is the future. Okay, the future. We love the future. Okay. So I mean that’s our quick take, isn’t it? That’s a lot. That’s a lot. We that was not a quick take. Talk about size take. So this is Kate Holterhoff, James Governor at Microsoft Builds 2026 with our medium-sized take.

Kate Holterhoff (10:31)
It’s a medium size.