posted on Monday, June 06, 2005 8:09 PM
by
roydictus
Steve Ballmer's keynote kicks off Tech-Ed Orlando nicely
This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote speech kicked off Tech-Ed talking about the “New World of Work” as envisioned by Microsoft. This reminded me very much of the yearly internal-only Microsoft Technical Briefing (MTB) and Microsoft Global Briefing (MGB) events that I attended while at MS -- every year there's a new slogan such as “Realize Your Potential” etc., and they all boil down to the same thing: we want to create software that makes people's lives easier, tools that help them jump farther and with less effort. It's just like Apple's slogan a few years ago, “The Power To Be Your Best.”
Anyway, the current wave of potential-realizing new world of work stuff generally means better communication and connectivity. People want to travel, use software and devices etc. using a single identity, they want to know who they can reach and how, etc. This is nothing new really; it has been a central tenet of portals for years.
The key is, however, that the new tools make it easier to get there, or make it easier for developers to write software that gets people there. Microsoft's Live Communications Server is an example of the former, and Visual Studio 2005 is an example of the latter. What I'm really looking forward to, besides the full RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, not to mention Longhorn at some time, is actually using the recently-announced Windows Mobile 5.0. According to Steve, or should I call him Mr Ballmer, some 40 OEMs are going to ship devices based on this OS this year. In addition to that, we can expect Windows 2003 Release 2 this year too, and of course the 64-bit version of Windows 2003 is here already (if not, Microsoft put a bogus DVD in my event bag...)
.net is gaining momentum
Earlier this year, I heard from Microsoft Belgium that .net had surpassed Java as an enterprise development platform in Europe. Ballmer quoted some numbers, claiming a 43% market share for .net as developers' primary platform vs. 35% for Java. That's quite impressive, given that .net is much younger and that version 2.0 is still in Beta today. Part of that success is of course due to Microsoft's excellent marketing, but most of it, I think, to the sheer quality of the environment.
I've been coaching a couple of Java developers during their switch to C# for a while now, and they too realized the value of C#/.net quickly. Okay, Visual Studio.NET 2003 is not up to par with Eclipse, but Visual Studio 2005 definitely is. The fact that .net Beta 2 scores up to 200% faster execution time than IBM WebSphere 6 on Sun Microsystem's own WS-Test 1.1 benchmark also shows that it's far superior on the server.
Seeing that .net is a core technology in upcoming systems such as SQL Server 2005 and Longhorn, and seeing that it looks like it's going to get integrated into the other server products such as Commerce Server 2006 more and more, Microsoft's strategy and vision of interconnected systems based on managed code is starting to come together, and will provide a huge payoff soon...