Business

PDC 2008: Reflections

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models.

PDC 08

Windows 7 - first impressions

I have now done some initial testing and evaluation of the 6801 build of Windows 7, which we got at PDC 2008. First of all I was a bit disappointed that we did not get the updated UI that were shown during the keynote, instead we got a previous build that does not have that much changes in the UI. It boots pretty quick on my Virtual PC, yes I run it there – a little to early to switch out my main OS, and it has a nicer loading screen than Vista.

Microsoft Office

PDC 2008: Day 2 with Windows 7 and Office Live

Day two is official over. I’m just back from the attendee party at Universal Studios. Keynotes This Tuesday started with a couple of keynotes. I was fortunate and arrived just as they opened the keynote hall and got myself a seat in the front row. After Ray Ozzies intro Steven Sinofsky took over and showed Windows 7 for the first time in public. You can read about the demos on almost every blog, but here are the stuff that caught my attention:

PDC 08

PDC 2008: Pre-Con: Performance By Design

I have arrived at my first PDC and it’s an awesome experience. The conference is huge and I arrived here for the registration and breakfast and met up with some nice guys. I fetched my bags of goods which contained mostly magazines and a bunch of sponsor commercials. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday until the real bits (the hard-drive stuffed with goods) are released and revealed. The keynote on Tuesday morning will really be interesting.

SharePoint

PDC 2008: On my way

Sitting here in Zürich waiting for the delayed flight to Los Angeles and PDC 2008. This PDC is my first and I really look forward to it. I will suck in as much as I possibly can during the next few days. I have a couple of things on my agenda that I want to accomplish: Go through all of the Office Systems and SharePoint sessions to find out what’s going on Meet with the SharePoint MVPs, Product team and other cool SharePointers Listen and learn from the Experts Understand the Microsoft cloud vision even better, especially how do these services fit in a larger enterprise (I have not understood this yet) And of course be one of the first to try out all this new stuff!

SharePoint

Office System 2007 Service Pack 2 announced

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).