PDC - Bill Gates Keynote
Bill Gates gave this morning's first keynote at PDC 05. As is
customary, he had a video to augment his presentation. These are usually
very funny, but this one didn't do much for me (it was about Bill as a recruiter
or something, but I didn't think they pulled it off well). However, he did
make a great comment that brought laughter from the crowd. Yesterday,
there was a significant power outage in LA as a result of a technician error
that lasted for like half an hour (I was in the air on my way so I missed
it). So Bill quipped, "You know, I've said many times that the software
industry needs to become as reliable as the electic utitility companies... but I
meant we should become like them, not that they should be like us." :)
Bill covered some new features of Office 12 that make a lot of its existing
features much more discoverable and adds a lot of very cool features that make
customizing and formatting documents/spreadsheets/presentations much
easier. A preview of Vista showed off their gadgets which reminded me
quite a bit of Konfabulator, which I've
been using for a couple of months now. There will also be a lot more RSS
integration in IE7 and Vista.
Bill wrapped up with his vision of the future, which focuses on making SOA a
reliable framework that is simply assumed by application developers as a common
substrate for applications of tomorrow. He also suggested that, while in
the past MS did a great job on the client of integrating applications together
to form the MS Office suite, the next major integration they will do will be on
the server, with Windows Server System and optionally Windows Sharepoint
Services.