Stuart Colman is Managing Director, EMEA at Maxifier.

Whisper it quietly, but whisper it nonetheless... Redmond may well be the winner when it comes to the future of advertising.

Things don’t seem so rosy in Silicon Valley at the minute. Seemingly Apple, that once unstoppable force of nature, has met the combined immovable objects of consumer apathy/backlash and horrific CEO succession planning. Meanwhile, Google, the second of the holy trinity of our digital lives, has, I fear, bitten off a little more than it can chew and could soon stall on the back of (amongst other things) worldwide legislative forces and an unhealthy, all-consuming obsession with trying to beat Facebook at being Facebook.

So that only leaves the third of our holy trinity to fight the good fight, so do Microsoft have it in them to lead the way again?

"Microsoft - you're kidding me right?!?" Yes, I know we all know the aQuantive story and often use it as the basis for our ridicule (I'm as guilty as any, with my favourite saying being, “everything Microsoft touches turns to s**t”), but hear me out on this.

Why do we as an industry do what we do? In advertising, our ultimate goal is to make someone buy something - dress it up in a myriad industry acronyms, targeting capabilities and measurement metrics, but whether directly or indirectly, our goal is to play a part in getting someone to buy something.

We go about this under the guise of ad tech. The more sophisticated we get at how we serve ads to people in a digital environment, the better we are at knowing who to target, when, where and why, and the easier and more efficiently we make that buying process. All this has got to represent the future, right? That's what we all think, and what the holy trinity all strive to be masters of, right?

But what if it isn't? What if the rumours are true and Mr Ballmer really doesn’t get ad tech, or more pertinently, doesn't give a s**t about it. What if Microsoft, through Windows 8, has taken the time to look at what advertising is actually about and what advertisers want, and realised the future is about deep, device-neutral, immersive consumer engagement. Not about having a million ways in which to profile someone, a billion opportunities per second to bid on targeting that user and trillions of data bytes of processing power to talk about at ad tech conferences. What if Redmond has got it right and we've all got it wrong?

Windows 8 is on your PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone, soon to be on your games console and, before we know it, your connected TV. Every time you use these, you have a single login, you become a single user, a single focus for an advertising message across almost any visual medium of choice, offering a seamless, synchronised, immersive advertising platform. To an advertiser, that's the holy grail and all done without the need for much of our fancy ad tech.

I've only played with Windows 8 briefly, but from what I've seen, I like. It’s like the early iPhone iOS - simple, intuitive but able to fundamentally change the way we think and act. If Microsoft can get it to scale, can get the volume of users to see the benefits of a device neutral but single OS platform and can convince a (likely) sceptical advertiser audience of why it is the future, they may have not just a game changer, but THE game changer on their hands. It might also go a long way towards explaining some of their current industry positions, such as DNT on by default and their lack of any ad tech investment.

Food for thought...