I was surprised by one thing at the Bob Muglia keynote this morning: where was the audience enthusiasm? The content was pretty solid, but there weren’t any of the spontaneous audience applause moments I have come to expect at a major Microsoft event. It was more like a European audience which never warmed up. Brian Goldfarb, in particular, seemed surprised by how low key the audience was.
One demo that might have been expected to deliver hollers and whoops was Silverlight, running ten video streams at once in Firefox. But then TechEd is not a dork audience – its more about management.
Talking of management, what I was most interested in during the keynote was the dynamic systems initiative (DSI) deliverables. I have been hearing about model-driven management for the longest time and Microsoft is finally beginning to deliver. We saw some neat demos, which kicked off with a command line-driven provisioning of Windows Server Core, and some demonstrations of Microsoft Virtualisation Manager, including virtual machine imports from VMware, which is interesting. Embrace is the first act.
The management tools are undoubtedly powerful, based as they are on a metadata-driven approach to management, where all the management apps access the same data, but express it in different views and metaphors. Microsoft System Center should certainly help Windows shops to lower their cost of operations, but the toolset still feels very Windows-specific. I shouldn’t expect the Big 4 are too worried at this point. If nothing else, as Cote and I agreed, the UIs just felt too Windowsy for management old hands to get excited about them… Microsoft has finally internalised the need for CLIs in systems management. Now they just need to get the browser-view religion (even where browser consoles were used they still looked like Windows).
One other part of the keynote worth calling out were the new functions in Visual Studio.NET to develop to Office applications as clients. It turns out developing apps that take advantage of the new Office ribbon user interface may be easier than we might have thought. Organisations that bought into the joint Microsoft/SAP duet approach, which front ends SAP back ends with Outlook, are likely to be very happy to be able to do similar things themselves.
All in all they keynote probably did what it said on the tin. There was still too much vision, even though Microsoft set out to be content rich and vision light, but the firm has a lot of cool new technology to bring to market, and now it just needs to focus on education, education, education.
That’s what TechEd is for.
Disclosure: some parts of Microsoft are clients
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