{"id":173,"date":"2016-11-25T09:53:37","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T16:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/?p=173"},"modified":"2016-11-25T09:53:37","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T16:53:37","slug":"personas-and-demos-at-microsoft-connect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/2016\/11\/25\/personas-and-demos-at-microsoft-connect\/","title":{"rendered":"Personas and Demos at Microsoft Connect"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

At Microsoft Connect 2016<\/a> the subtexts for particular personae was as interesting as the news itself<\/a>. It was fascinating to watch how the announcements were delivered. Microsoft gave some solid live demos, and between what was said and how it was said we can extrapolate details about how Microsoft views the developer population.<\/p>\n

Part of this was as straightforward as noting the comments that were made on stage. The event was explicitly targeted at developers, and Scott Guthrie demonstrated this with laudatory statements in his keynote<\/a> like \u201cdevelopers are critical for organizations to succeed in this new world\u201d and \u201cthe impact that a developer can have has never been greater than it is today\u201d and \u201cthere\u2019s never been a better time to be a software developer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team clearly intended for their expanded Visual Studio product offerings to help reach an expanded developer audience. If there was any doubt about the target population, Guthrie again dispelled it with explicit commentary. While the event obviously attracted existing Microsoft users, Guthrie claimed that \u201ca lot of the developers watching [the event live stream] have never used any Microsoft dev tools or technologies ever before in their life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"guthrie_msconnect\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most the demos in the keynote session reflected this view of a mixed developer audience. Chris Dias\u2019 Visual Studio Code demo, for example, involved building a Node.js app from scratch against on MongoDB database developed on a Mac deployed to Linux-based backend. (Guthrie introduced it as \u201ca little non-traditional for a Microsoft developer conference.\u201d) From GitHub to npm to APIs, the tooling and messaging of this demo was clearly intended to demonstrate that Microsoft understood developer priorities and is ready to integrate into existing tool chains.<\/p>\n

Donovan Brown<\/a>\u2019s fantastic demo about the new Visual Studio-Azure-Docker integrations provided yet another view of how Microsoft segments the developer population. Brown\u2019s presentation starts at the 1:10:00 mark<\/a> and is absolutely worth watching if only to watch how he sells in his demo. It\u2019s fantastic.<\/p>\n

One of the first rules of sales is to understand what your product is; you\u2019re not selling a drill, you\u2019re selling holes in a wall<\/a>. Brown captured this truism better than any other demo I\u2019ve watched to date. He demoed Visual Studio, but that\u2019s not what he sold. He sold peace of mind; he sold the reassurance that you and your team\u2019s existing skills are still relevant; he sold accessibility to the technology trend du jour; he sold confidence.<\/p>\n

It was Brown\u2019s charisma that initially caught my attention, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that this demo targeted a slightly different demographic than the others. This demo wasn\u2019t from the command line. It was a gentle easing into the world of Docker containers through right clicking and context menus.<\/p>\n

\"donovanbrown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Microsoft did a good job at Connect using their demos to speak to various audiences. It\u2019s hard to sell both new technology and business\/skill continuity simultaneously. Dias\u2019 demo appealed to developers that feel comfortable using the command line to build an app from the ground up while Brown\u2019s demo reached a persona that relies on menus and built-in integrations. Furthermore, the company used the event to appeal to a spectrum of developers who had never used Microsoft products to the IT Pros and devs that rely on the familiar Microsoft UI.<\/p>\n

Disclosure<\/strong>: Microsoft is a RedMonk customer, and they comped my conference ticket and T&E for the event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  At Microsoft Connect 2016 the subtexts for particular personae was as interesting as the news itself. It was fascinating to watch how the announcements were delivered. Microsoft gave some solid live demos, and between what was said and how it was said we can extrapolate details about how Microsoft views the developer population. Part<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Personas and Demos at Microsoft Connect","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[42,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","category-microsoft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/files\/2016\/11\/guthrie.png","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}