Ozzie has been regarded as the thinker who will take the place of Gates and set the tone for the direction of the company's software. I think that's a pretty huge burden.
Generally speaking, he's got the right idea in the bigger picture, that the PC over time is replaced by a combination of devices and stuff "in the cloud." I do think that we're headed there. I'm just not that convinced that Microsoft can get there. On one hand, you have the developer tools folks and the Xbox division doing great things, delivering new stuff to market relatively quickly, but then you have dogs like the Office and Windows people.
He asserts that advertising is ultimately the thing that drives the monetization of this stuff, and generally speaking, I think I agree with him. As almost an aside, he said that this is part of the reason they're so interested in Yahoo, because of the creative input that could lend (and I'm sure the substantial ad experience).
I like to hear this guy talk, and I think he's a smart guy. It's not his, or Microsoft's, vision that I question. It's more the execution.
Dean Hachamovitch leads the IE team, and he's here selling IE8. Seems like just yesterday he was on stage doing IE7. Even last time around he was very honest about what they didn't do well, and he's doing the same here. He did a demo showing Safari, Firefox and IE7, with IE7 failing in terms of CSS big time. Then he showed IE8, apparently for the first time in public, and it works like a champ. If only they could get the bits out today and force everyone else to use it!
He showed a number of things available in the developer tools, and people were w00ting and clapping like it was an Apple keynote. It's stuff that has been available in Firebug, for the most part, for quite awhile. But whatever, it's good to see them going down that road.
He also showed some new things in terms of offering contextual linking options, and something called a "WebSlice," which is like RSS for a small piece of a page. I guess it's a cool idea, but why do I want to tie this stuff to IE? I do like that they're making it all available for use under Creative Commons. At least people may use it then (*cough* active push or whatever *cough*).
Oh, and beta 1 is available now. Nice Jobsian plug. :)
Scott Guthrie is plugging Silverlight 2, and there is a lot of buzz around it here, to the extent that it's obviously a priority with Microsoft. It is a pretty cool tech, and the fact that you can start jumping into it quickly as a .NET monkey gives it a lot of appeal over Flash. Now make it playback H.264 video, and I'm in.
Through another guy from the tools area, they demo'd how easy it is to build an ad with Silverlight, complete with video. I wish they'd say what you do when the user doesn't have the plug-in. While the adoption rate is apparently taking off, with a million and a half downloads a day, I suspect it has a long way to go.
A guy from Doubleclick showed how you can hook various events into your Silverlight ad creative to make call backs to log (ad expanded, video started, ended, etc.), and I know metrics geek will just love that.
There's no question in my mind that Silverlight is cool, and I'd love to play with it, but it's just that whole thing where I want adoption to be further along before I invest time and money into it. I suspect that with the summer Olympics using it (they're demoing the site here for the first time), that could be it. NBC is all about it. The video app that they're building is nuts. If it can in fact handle the bandwidth requirements, I can see this being the future of sports consumption. If they can figure out how to get it on a TV, that would be the turning point.
I think the big news for code monkeys is that the Silverlight controls and a new testing framework for it are now available, and they're open source, and you can do whatever the hell you want with that source. I gotta say, the culture change at Microsoft is stunning. I'm so glad that they've finally managed to let go of all the tight (and ultimately useless) control.
Overall, I thought that the Silverlight parts of the keynote were exceptional in exploring the potential for better connected application. To me, there's a clear issue in this space. HTML and Javascript as a platform kind of suck, because neither was intended to do the things we make it do right now. I wouldn't go as far as calling it hard, but it's not as easy as it should be. Silverlight is clearly intended to be the solution.
One other thing that comes to mind is that WPF in general is so superior to Windows Forms and all of the old Win32 and MFC crap that it's a shame they can't pull an Apple and say, "Sorry, the next version of Windows means you need to write your apps to this new stuff." I think it's time to let go of DOS support.
Onward to the break out sessions! (After lunch, that is!)
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