TechEd Boston started Sunday night with Ray Ozzie admonishing us that there's a 'Services Disruption' coming and proposing the slightly tongue-twisting 'Client Server Service Synergy' (and the lesser-used companion phrase 'Client Server Service Symmetry') as the way forward, with Microsoft offering more services in future.
Ray with the usual dramatic structure of a presentation (much like what is recommended in the "beyond bullets" book), setting up that we're heading for a new disruption in the way that we work. He did the standard mainframe -> mini computers -> micro computers -> client/server -> the internet ("the mother of all disruptions") -> peer-peer set of disruptions, personalised through his own life experiences with Lotus Notes and Groove. There was the standard argument that we need to be on the lookout for new disruptions.
The drivers that are changing things for today are the promise of multiprocessors (32 to 1000 CPUs inside a single machine - up to "oodles" in Ray's words) the reduction in storage space and the growing ubiquity of bandwidth. The interesting point that Ray highlighted was the fact that in the past it was research and corporate environments that drove datacentres, whereas today these were being driven by experience with consumer market through search, advertising and consumer shopping sites. Ray's point was that the benefits of investments in these environments will be felt more widely.
He wasn't terribly specific about how this would happen, though he was trying to position Microsoft's approach as a mix between the client services approach and external services in a "client server service synergy". He showed windows desktop search searching over the internet, SharePoint sites and the local machine as example of this. He also showed Microsoft Dynamics using 'business mashups' with Windows Live virtual earth. He also mentioned the online/offline architecture of Groove. There was much mention of the Windows Live set of products. There was a Windows Live Identity that I hadn't heard of before - I'm assuming it's a rename of Passport? It might have been the jetlag but it felt like another moment of marketing fatigue (apparently MOM will become System Server Operations Manager as well).
The presentation hall felt very much like an aircraft hangar and the regular sound of planes overhead reinforced this. Ray was the first keynote speaker I've seen wearing a suit jacket on one of these talks. Obviously the chip-implant wasn't powerful enough to convert him to the standard casual 'uniform' of a blue shirt and a pair of chinos.