[I had the honor of attending the Microsoft Technology Summit 2006. This post summarizes the exciting parts of the three-day event.]
Jim Gray
What would you do to have dinner with Bill Gates? I’d trade it for a five minute chat with Jim Gray. The man who can see the future more clearly than we can see the past. He knows why CPUs are not getting faster, and why it doesn’t matter. Why harddisks are getting bigger, but not better, and how it all comes down to a tiny piece of silicon. He’s science without the ivory tower, socioeconomics without the politics, accomplishments without the ego to tar it.
What a way to impress the geek in me.
Don Box
Can anyone give a better presentation than this man? He starts off by asking for questions from the audience and adds them to a list … in Scheme. When someone asks why Microsoft decided to drop Indigo and use corporate-speak WCF, Don writes in his list “WTF – WTF?â€. Later we get to hear the real answer: “We put these names in because they suck. … We didn’t want people saying ‘I’m an Indigo’ programmerâ€
Smart, funny and honest. For an hour that feels like five minutes, everything about Microsoft makes sense. I almost want to ask “are you hiring?â€
Ray Ozzie’s team.
Talk about a cool job. They get to work for Microsoft and earn the respect of hackers and open source mavens. And all for building cool technologies that even mother could use. For those who don’t exactly know, they’re the brains behind the Live clipboard. Watch that group: that’s where innovation is coming from. They’re building the Microsoft Office of the future.
Special thanks to Tantek for arranging this.
Dinner time.
No secret that Microsoft knows how to entertain, though I’m still upset I missed the crab cakes. Some friends I have. But the evenings were more than just good food. That’s when you get to talk to Microsoft people at eye level and realize that yes, Microsoft does have a human face and a voice.
Microsoft: you need more of that. You don’t need better Java or better Linux, you need to step down and get involved in the community. You need to talk and you need to listen, you need to make money, but you also need to be honest. And for three short days, you managed to do that extremely well. Kodus.
C#/.Net.
Microsoft does have a better Java. You have to expect that at version 3, with no legacy other than Sun’s mistakes, they’d get it right. Not a whole lot better, but if you’re a Microsoft shop, you can’t go wrong betting on C#/.Net. All the enterprise technologies at your finger tips. But if you need more than one platform, more than one vendor, and if open source does not offend your religion, you’re better off with Java. It’s all the open source technologies that tip the scale.
WWF
Not to be confused with professional wrestling, Microsoft’s WWF is workflow for the rest of us. Or at least the rest of us that are the few of us that get what it’s about. And by version 3.0, they’ll get it right. It’s still very rough around the edges, but it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s workflow scripting, not workflow enterprise integration, OSX Automator or at least runner up. And it bakes transactions and compensations into the platform.
The killer app? Not WWF itself, but the underlying stuff. You can easily write apps that have better redo/undo, smarter page flows. It may not sound like much, but it’s one of those incremental improvements that would help a lot.
And last but not least, thanks to our hosts, especially Nima, Anand and Tanya for all your hard work.
Matt Augustine