With a combination of jetlag and a persistent cough keeping me from sleeping, it seems like a pretty good moment to jot down some thoughts on the first couple of days of the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, “the first PDC in the history of PDCs”, as Don Box said, “where Microsoft has not launched a new data access stack”.
My overall feeling about this PDC is that MS has fluffed the marketing angle really badly. There doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent story behind this PDC launch wave. MS will tell you this is the “Software + Services” PDC, but they’ve failed to convince that that’s a central driving philosophy, rather than a generic term they’ve applied to try to categorise what they’re about.
The pitch of the keynotes has felt slightly wrong, and I think the main reason for that is that so much of what could have been the big splashy announcements to get the crowd on their feet had already been announced prior to PDC. The last month has seen a whole raft of things trickle out of microsoft not with a bang but with a whimper: the Windows 7 name; the fact that MS was launching what Ballmer called an ‘OS for the Cloud’; Silverlight 2.0. Even a couple of developer crowdpleasers, like ASP.NET MVC hitting beta and the deal where MS will start shipping JQuery sneaked out via the blogosphere rather than being saved a couple of weeks for the big event.
When the ‘Azure’ name leaked out (via a Microsoft RSS feed) before the Monday morning keynote, all the wind was taken out of the sails of that keynote. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Ray Ozzie feels too corporate as a presenter to engage a dev crowd. The crux of the Azure announcement really comes down to Microsoft going into web hosting, and while the cloud provisioning model is qualitatively different to your classic rackspace offering, it doesn’t demo any differently. The point of Azure is to make scaling transparent; transparency doesn’t demo well.
And my overall impression of Azure is… well, ‘meh’. Google and Amazon offer cloud hosting platforms; now so does MS. Each has proprietary management APIs, proprietary storage, proprietary hosting APIs. Developing a system for any one of these cloud services locks you in to that vendor’s offering. I’d expected Microsoft to, well, act like Microsoft, and make a platform play. Release Azure as a platform for cloud hosting services, let third party ‘hosting partners’ take up the hosting part of the problem, and change the cloud service hosting market. I could commit to building Windows-Azure-based apps if I knew that I had competition among hosting providers, just as I am happy now to build ASP.NET web apps knowing I can go to a range of hosts to get my app out on the net. With MS as the sole provider, I can’t commit to their platform, when it could turn out to just be another .NET MyServices and disappear quietly into the sunset in 12 months. No game-changer, so… ‘meh’.
Of course, MS wanted to use the day 1 keynote to set the message that will go out in the non-specialist press about their plans; the audience for the cloud announcement was the business world looking at Microsoft’s positioning relative to Google, not the crowd in the hall. But come on, the leak of the name and the foreshadowing done by Ballmer a few weeks back, this barely deserved to be called an announcement.
Meanwhile, while I was stuck in that keynote fighting to get a slice of WiFi bandwidth and failing, out on the net, Microsoft shipped the .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 CTP, and the Oslo SDK CTP. I didn’t know about this until I got back out of the PDC keynote hall. Frankly, if Microsoft is releasing a new version of Visual Studio but not making a big deal of it in the PDC conference hall, something has gone seriously wrong. It almost feels like there was originally a different plan, but that the Azure keynote took centre stage at the last minute, too late to change the scheduled VS and Oslo releases.
Something has definitely gone wrong with the Oslo launch. Oslo incorporates a new language, new tools, and represents a new development paradigm; it’s exactly the kind of stuff you can hang a PDC on. The Oslo team have come with a ton of marketing collateral, they’ve got branding, they’ve got t-shirts, they’ve got balloons… in the Microsoft pavilion, this is a big coming out party for a big technology, but if you’re looking to learn about what MS is releasing from sitting in the keynote hall, well you wouldn’t even know about it. Even after Don Box and Chris Anderson did their keynote – they slipped in a tiny demo of IntelliPad, an Oslo tool, but it felt almost like guerrilla marketing, not part of the message they were there to sell.
Day two keynote, we got some real meat, and felt like this was more like what we expect from PDC. But still the foreshadowing announcements had stolen half the thunder. YES we got to see the first ever public demo of the Windows 7 desktop (the first EVER DEMO! Steve Jobs would’ve had us eating out of his hands…), but imagine how much bigger that presentation would’ve been if it had also been the first time MS had confirmed that the product name was Windows 7 (or even if they’d chosen a better name).
As it was, the biggest cheers Microsoft squeezed out of the PDC crowd were for demoing Windows 7 multi-monitor remote desktop, and the announcement that VS2010 was being rebuilt in WPF (and would support multiple monitors too… spotting a theme here?) – other than that, polite ripples of applause greeted a few nice features, but there was no ovation. ScottGu’s demo of customising the WPF-based VS editor was incredibly well-received (it’s always great to watch Scott throw out code on a keynote stage), though the momentum was short-lived.
With the right staging, they could have whipped up the crowd with VS2010 multitargeting support; .NET 4.0/2.0 side-by-side in process; foreshadowing Anders’ C# 4.0 announcements… And what was that tantalising ‘SilverLight running outside the browser’ hint? Was that iPlayer app they demoed really SilverLight acting like Adobe Air? did they just forget to announce that one too?
Failing to keep Azure secret enough; failing to announce Oslo; failing to announce .NET 4.0, VS 2010, C# 4.0 (a language Eric Lippert has been carefully describing as ‘a potential hypothetical future language’ for the past three years) and VB10; failing to use this as a platform to properly launch Windows 7; there’s a lot of fail in the PDC marketing machinery.
But away from the keynotes, that marketing failure doesn’t take away from the fact that MS is launching all that technology here. Real stuff is being announced during every session slot, and I’m having to catch up on the news via twitter and the blogs from the sessions I’m not in. In many ways, it feels like I’d be better informed if I wasn’t actually here on site, but that would mean missing out on the chance to meet up and talk to the teams and get some real insight. I had a great catch up with Jeff King, who’s the guy behind the JQuery intellisense file you can now get hold of; he showed me a few cool new capabilities coming up in VS JavaScript intellisense capability. I also had some great opportunities to chat with guys from the Oslo group, to see how their tools fit with my apps. I’m looking forward to more of the same today, especially tonight at the Ask the Experts session. I’ll also be trying to take in the repeat of Anders’ C# 4.0 talk.
So I’m disappointed in Microsoft’s lack of control over the proceedings, its seeming lack of self-awareness and co-ordination. But I’m not disappointed in the tech, the content I’m seeing, or the people I’m meeting. PDC’s still worthwhile in a blog-driven age because of the connections you can make on site, and no leakage of codenames changes that.