TechEd Keynote
- 1 minute to read
- edit
I finally have some free time tonight from all of the activities at TechEd 2007, so I wanted to take some time to summarize what I’ve seen and done so far. To start with, I was able to get a front-row seat for the Keynote on Monday morning.
The keynote started out with a short “movie” showing Bob Muglia going back in time with Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as “Doc” Brown from the “Back to the Future” movies. The theme to the video was to try and show how Microsoft has sometimes fallen short in delivering on it’s “vision” for developers and IT staff.
Even though the keynote promised to be “vision-free”, it did still contain a lot of Microsoft vision for continuing the journey towards their Dynamic IT vision. The keynote spoke to the evolution of IT from a cost center to a profit center, saying the Dynamic IT initiatives will help decrease the traditional 70/30 split. This Dynamic IT vision is part of the 10-year Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is now 4 years old.
Despite the vision-speak, there were some very interesting demos showing Microsoft Operations Manager 2007, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 (code-named “Katmai”), BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (to be released in Q3 of 2008), and Visual Studio 2007 (code-named “Orcas”).
A few things that came out of the keynote is that the virtualization features of Windows Server 2008 (code-named “Viridian”) won’t be out until about 6 months after RTM (sometime in late 2007). The other is that development of Office applications has become tremendously easier with VS 2008.