benjaminm's blog - Steve Ballmer Keynote

Monday, May 24, 2004

I'm with all of the 'Blue Shirts', speakers and the Microsoft staff, in the keynote overflow room, sharing the experience of watching Steve Ballmer on a video screen. Here are some key points:

He's looking trimmer. A gasp of 'Atkins!' went around the room.
Key messages - do more with less.
The next 10 years are going to be even greater than the last.
Only Pfizer spends more than Microsoft on R&D.
Remember 10 years ago TCP/IP was a separate business to the OS.
Integration is the key. How many data access layers does Microsoft need.
How can we narrow down the skillset required to know how to use the products. Integrate to reduce the overhead required to use the platform.
Windows XP SP2 has taken priority over Longhorn recently.
It used to be 'features, features, features' now it's 'listen, listen, listen'.
Watson is one of the biggest advances in computing. Being able to send crash reports to Microsoft means there is a statistical way of rating the issues that users are having.
Integrated innovation and customer responsiveness to do more with less.
Security is key focus.
Spam is too cheap to send - we need to add cost and burden. Using techniques like making the sender prove who they are.
Interoperability has been a key focus. Microsoft has done more than most people have ever given them credit for in integration. Microsoft is absolutely behind the XML stack as an open standard. The 'best and most important thing to happen to our industry'. It's an 'architected' way of doing interoperability. The old way was writing XML to connect each system.
Microsoft Office beta web services - allow Office to be a smart end client to web services.
Becky Dias gets on stage.
WSE 2.0 is released! Also the Microsoft Office Information Bridge are entering Beta. Basically web services integrated with Microsoft Office task pane.
She's clicked on someone's name in Outlook. A task pane has come up with a form that lets her do a stock trade, calling a webservice and gets an ID back again, all without leaving Outlook.
Demoing policy. Not sure if the audience are getting this. But it's very cool. We don't have to right code anymore. Definitely should have spent more time polishing the WSE Settings Tool wizard screens.
.NET has more than 50% of the US market. Customers think it is 66% more reliable, 70% think it is faster, 2.7x people think it is more secure.
The VSIP program has been increased. Oracle and SAP and TibCo will use Visual Studio for their platforms.
Visual Studio 'Team System' - now trying to do more as part of the software development life cycle. Group development, modelling, testing and deployment.
It looks like we now get bug tracking within Visual Studio.
Showing a Whitehorse style screen that diagrams the deployment of the application and can check to ensure that it will work in that environment. It produces 'build errors' when you compile it.
Can specify that the system passes build rules, static analysis and unit tests.
Finally we have unit tests that are part of the build system (this got a clap!). Now we know what James Newkirk has been doing at Microsoft! Rewriting NUnit!
Also includes code coverage tools as well (another clap)
There's also a security version of FxCop that is built into 'Visual Studio Team System' based on Microsoft Research's work on Secure Computing Initiative.
But wait, there's more .... load testing as well (more claps!)
Back to the Information worker. Steve has the feeling that SharePoint Team Server, Portal Server, Office and Live Meeting haven't been as well adopted as they should have.
There will be advances in searching as a result of 'strong competition' (see Google)
Why choose Microsoft over Linux or Java? More integreated innovation, better responsiveness and trustworthiness, partnerships, choice (more applications, better interoperability).