Microsoft brings developers home for Build 2017

Microsoft has made big changes to how it operate under Nadella. SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Build 2017 kicks off Wednesday morning in Seattle, a homecoming for the tech giant after years of holding its annual developers conference here in San Francisco. Some 5,500 developers have heeded the Redmond, Wash., company's call, helping Build sell out in a day. As Facebook, Apple and Google do with their big developer confabs, Microsoft will use the event to evangelize about its strategy while urging software pros to spend time developing much-needed apps for Microsoft's ecosystem. Chat-bots were the big story out of Build 2016 -- CEO Satya Nadella pronounced the artificial-intelligence helpers "the new apps" -- but famously fizzled out of the gate when, days before the conference, hackers turned Microsoft's Tay bot into an epithet-spewing racist.