I'm attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week in
This is clearly the biggest Microsoft Partner show ever with over 10K attendees and Allison was clearly surprised by the standing room only room crowd as during the transition between her and the next speaker she left her microphone on and could be heard saying backstage "this is amazing... usually people just trickle in...".
Allison Watson's opening keynote was good. She keyed in on a couple of topics that I'm sure are on the minds of all of the partners in attendance: how partners work with other partners, and how Microsoft is going to help them become profitable.
One of the more interesting demos that Kevin Turner showed was Microsoft's Saleforce.com competitive Windows Live CRM offering. Pricing for two service levels was announced as Enterprise Edition $59/mo, Professional Edition $44/mo. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will build a software-as-a-service platform that doesn't circumvent the partner channel. Kevin said something about this service only being sold though partners, but the details weren't clear.
An interesting, competitive, a bit one-sided, statistic given during Kevin's key note this morning was the IDC Microsoft Windows Server Growth against Linux report for 1Q07 Windows May 27, 2007: Microsoft Server revenue grew faster then Linux Server revenue for the first time since IDC started tracking these metrics. Kevin made a statement around Linux not being free, which still misses the point around why corporate accounts use Linux. It's interoperability and scale, Kevin, not cost… Using Appistry's Enterprise Application Fabrics to scale .NET solutions can help, Kevin. Drop me a line and I can tell you how.
Steve Ballmer opened his presentation saying he wanted to talk to the partners with the same openness he uses with Microsoft employees, which was great. His presentation focused on the 70 things they wanted to do with the $7B they spend in R&D yearly, mainly focusing on the evolution and vision around the changes coming with the user interface and the computational model. He talked about the best of the desktop experience combined with a flexible hosting model that includes on premise to completely off premise that Microsoft calls Software + Services. (Which some would call software as a service - SaaS).
Hmm… I think I see fabrics fitting in here VERY well!!!
He had to get in his shot to the Apple iPhone as he said it had a "big heavyweight operating system, blah, blah, blah.."
So the morning keynotes went well. I'm looking forward to talking to some Microsoft partners about how we can work with them to scale .NET applications!
Until next time..
Mark
