Here’s a recap of the first day of the event some observations about the events and content:
Bill Gates Keynote- Microsoft is embracing the Web, and the proof is all around us. Live Clipboard, support for RSS native in the platform, the Atlas toolkit, WPF/e. The future is bright. While we focus on the Web as a platform, we’ll still focus on enabling devices such as UMPC (“Origami”) and Windows Mobile to empower users. The MySpace guys, Aber and Allen, had some good things to talk about. They run a huge and amazing infrastructure on Windows and SQL Server. They count page views in the billions and add hundreds of thousands of new users a day. I’m not a MySpace fan but they’re doing some great stuff with our technology including a Vista sidebar gadget and their Profile 2.0. Marc Canter chided them about open APIs.
O’Reilly and Gates Discussion- Web 2.0 = Windows Live? That was the question. Tim challenged Bill in a respectful way and Bill seemed to open up his personality a bit. He’s a fierce competitor but truly seems to want to foster a competitive software industry, likely because through competition we all get better. O’Reilly talked about Reading 2.0- we desperately need that. Gates made a “Web 3.0”. Fin.
Rounding out the keynote sessions were Dean H. showing some cool IE stuff and Rich Turner did an InfoCard demo that missed the mark. Not Rich’s fault, but there wasn’t a proper foundation for what InfoCard really is so the demo sank like a stone. Scott Guthrie’s ATLAS demo was very good. He basically wrote the app from scratch (well, sorta) and it came off really nicely. Color me impressed.
Web 2.0- Show Me the Money- A who’s who of the Web on this panel. Tim O’Reilly, Jeremy Zawodny, Michael Arrington, Royal Farris, Adam Trachtenberg. Weird session for me, felt like I was watching a blog conversation being acted out on a stage. The snark-factor wasn’t too high though, but it felt like an echo chamber to me. I left halfway through the session.
SPARK recap- the convergence of Web 2.0 and SOA- There were some great ideas here around the convergence of Web 2.0 and “heavy weight” service oriented architectures and the juxtaposition of the consumer and enterprise space for Web applications, but you can only be so intrigued by a “too soon” recap of a very productive session that happened over the weekend that the audience didn’t have the benefit of attending. I’ll be more interested to see what comes out of that session within a month or two.
On to Day 2…
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