TechEd 2006: First Night, Wrong Bus Hijinks

I’m in Boston for the Server and Tools Business Analyst Summit at TechEd 2006. Tonight was a lengthy keynote with Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, Chris Caposella, and several product managers demo’ing server, tools, and management apps. <!–A stream of it is available.–>

Misadventures

I ended up getting a cab to the wrong hotel from the airport. The cabbie didn’t know about the new Hilton, so I ended up at the old one. Sure, no problem. But, I got directions to get on the wrong bus to take the short trip from the convention center to the hotel. Instead I ended up somewhere near Braintree. Man, there’s a name for a town.

As such, much of my energy for this evening is gone, so I’ll just summarize some highlights, with light analysis and comment, of the keynote and write up more later.

Kernel Mustard has some more detailed, live-blogging of the keynotes, as does CNET’s Martin LaMonica.

people_ready

There were several interesting trains of thought nestled in with the current MSFT server and tools pitch. Which is fine, but in my case, I saw most of it at MMS 2006.

If you boil it down, the pitch is this: if you buy into the Microsoft stack, we have a lot of really great software that works great together, both as a desktop application and — coming soon! — as a hybrid applications.

Collab

Much of the information and collaborative apps (or “services” ;>) were Web 2.0 mashup wet-dreams, but with a Microsoft twist.

For example: Chris Caposella demoed how he could search for a project and, along with all the documents, find all the people who knew about this project. He then sorted the people by his “social distance” to them, so he could find the person he knew best. Then he clicked on that person, and could see her presence (online or off), and send an IM.

The potential for all of that exists on the web now — especially with microformats and social networks — but all the sites don’t play well together as I’ve mentioned several times here. While Microsoft is a silo, much of the web is still in Roach Motel mode. In both cases, it’s not quite fair to look poorly on the silo and motel: it takes a long time just to figure out how to format and markup all the data, and even longer to figure out what to do with it, then still longer to actually code up those actions.

I’d say we’re still in part one — defining the data — on the web, though people occasionally make scouting trips into the second and third parts.

There Can be Only One

That schedule handicapping aside, as Koranteng and I discussed a few weeks ago over coffee and tea, this idea that the web on the intranet and the internet are somehow different has to stop. That kind of madness just points at a short-view of both ‘nets.

I mention that because during what was otherwise the most interesting part of the keynote, Chris Caposella said something along the lines of, now, we all know that the intranet is different than the internet when it comes to search and applications. We have structured data on intranets.

Sure, there are obviously differences in the structure of data behind-the-firewall and beyond-the-firewall. But, that’s an error on both parts. Each of the two ‘nets need to pull in the strengths of the other. And, in reality, people are doing that, e.g., identity management on the public web and all those links and XML you see in desktop applications.

Disruption

Of Ray Ozzie’s forward looking section of the keynote, I wrote in my notes:

So, here we have a CTO of Microsoft chronicling his exciting life as a
disrupter: x86, Lotus 123, Lotus Notes, Groove, etc. We are to presume, then, that Microsoft is about to be a
disrupter itself. Once again, I am reminded of that cellphone
commercial:

Old Exec: This cellphone plan is just my way of sticking it to the man.
Young Assistant: But, sir. You’re the man. So…aren’t you sticking it to yourself?
Old Exec: [pause] maybe.

Which isn’t to say that there’s something stinky going on here. Not at
all. Again, it just begs the question: “all right, let’s take it for a
drive and check it out.” Working software over comprehensive presentation.

Some Questions

At the end of the evening, I have the following questions and area of interested to keep my peepers peeled for during the next two days:

• Interop with others, including non-vendors. For example, does all the fancy IM and presence stuff work with GTalk? Yahoo!?
• As a Microsoft customer, how much it costs to “get in the game”? Can I just get a single figure per person as a rough estimate?
• What are Microsoft’s revenue models for the disruptive path Ozzie layed out?
• What % of the Ozzie think is Microsoft’s biz-model now, next year, and
  five years out?
• How do you change an organization — Microsoft — to deliver on the future vision? How will Microsoft make the elephant dance?
• How do you pull in your legacy customers to avoid the In Search
  of Stupidity pitfalls?

So, we’ll see what’s shakin’ this week.

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