Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, attended Salesforce's client conference and showed off Microsoft applications such as Delve and PowerBI, foreign media reported. The incident itself is surprising because the two companies used to be competitors, but they are now partners.

Nadella explained to wired magazine the "three big ambitions" of Microsoft's industrial Internet era. First, Microsoft is trying to "reinvent office software" to develop new technologies that enable users to do their jobs better and make their personal lives better. He points out that Microsoft is "unique" in technology and is the only company that is involved in both "business and consumer technology" and "individuals and organisations". He wants Microsoft to do its part to "promote personal success" and "organizational success".

Second, Microsoft is "developing smart clouds". Microsoft's cloud can not just hosted application, or as a service sales of cloud services, and can "collect" to create the data in the cloud services, and to convert these data into intelligence, including related to business decisions and fitness tracker of intelligence.

Third, Mr Nadella wants to "calculate more individualised and more natural". For Windows 10, this means using Cortana to "talk to" computers and complete Internet searches. It also includes importing natural languages in applications such as PowerBI, consulting business questions and getting answers, and even getting data from data sources such as Twitter and Salesforce. In addition, it also includes computer vision, and Windows 10 lets users log on to the system by recognizing the user's face.

Mr Nadella said that soon the Internet of things would make all objects around users "smart" objects, "computing will be everywhere" and Microsoft was trying to improve the ease of use of the Internet of things.

Mr Nadella says the three ambitions of Microsoft are "all around us, but we are working hard".

Mr Nadella's vision for Microsoft is ambitious, and if these ideals are met, Microsoft's post-pc era is not just about survival, it is about to flourish.