Ray Ozzie's Keynote - 1

If you want to know why Microsoft made the play for Yahoo, look no further than one of the three main focuses that Ray Ozzie sees for the near future. He expects on-line ad revenues to double to $80B annually over the next two years. And to not make such a play is to basically concede the bulk of the market to Google (my opinion, not his)

The second prong in Microsoft's strategy is based on the idea that the Internet has become a hub of a large number of devices. The list goes from PC to gaming systems to cell phones to cars. The idea of the Web is to bring together a collection of personal devices. And one of the guiding principles of Microsoft's software offerings is to provide a mechanism to facilitate this future.

The business side of the "Internet is a hub" is being brought out in virtualization. Current software will be "refactored" to support virtualization in many different ways.

"Small pieces loosely joined" (a Weinberg quote, I believe) is the new motto.

More to come...

Looking for Clues

So one of the question about MIX is whether there will be a 'surprise' announcement. Last year, it was the Windows Live Streamer that allowed people to store video in the cloud and have it served to your site.

I don't think the availability of Silverlight 2 qualifies. There are many sessions that have a Silverlight 2 label and in the hands-on lab section, I was told that the Silverlight 2 labs that are in the list won't be available until after the keynote. So not much of a surprise there.

However, there is a block of hands-on lab computers that were not active yesterday. And there is a rumour of a session titled "X talking about Y" that will be dropped into one of the open session blocks. Both of these suggest that some announcement in the tool realm will be dropped sometime in the next couple of hours. Stay tuned.

CodeCamp and Mix08 - on my blog at robburke.net

Thanks to everyone who came out to my WPF and Silverlight presentation at the Toronto CodeCamp event yesterday.  It was great to have a chance to speak with so many interested and enthusiastic people who hung around after the talk.

 

Because the presentation was a riff on my What's New in WPF 3.5 and Silverlight talk from ObjectSharp's Visual Studio 2008 at the Movies, if you're looking for follow-up information, your best bet is this set of links.

(Bonus link: Rob Windsor (now "Channel 5.5") interviewed some of us speakers at the pub and posted some follow-up video here.)

I'm off to the Mix08 conference in Las Vegas tomorrow!  There should be very exciting news at Mix for .NET client-tier developers.

Cross-posting from my real blog to this ObjectSharp feed still isn't possible, so if you'd like to follow my updates on all things Silverlight and WPF, your best bet is to subscribe to my blog at http://www.robburke.net

Vegas, here we come!  

 


User Experience in Toronto and Las Vegas

I’m presenting at the Toronto Code Camp on Saturday about What’s new in Visual Studio 2008 for WPF 3.5 and Silverlight developers. My presentation will be an updated version of the presentation I gave at ObjectSharp’s Visual Studio 2008 At the Movies event, which hopefully you’ll find interesting and useful if you’re doing client-side [...]