This morning (after yesterday’s speedy departure from The Lakes) saw me in central London, in a suit. Not just in general central London, but more specifically in Microsoft HQ on the first floor of some huge glass-clad building in Victoria.
I was given the opportunity of tickets for this small event not too long ago, and thinking it might be good chance to hear some big names speak, snapped them up.
It had been arranged (or at least was being compared) by Ryan Carson of Future Of… fame and the idea was for the speakers to express ideas about the relationship between software, services and Web 2.0 companies in the UK.
The talks were opened by Lars Lindstedt, MS Software Economist and probably the least known of the major speakers. He referenced research which essentially said that in recent years enterprise productivity has been going downwards, but that trend can be bucked by the use of software (basically a justification for more systems I assume) and discussed the way Microsoft is predicting that the way enterprise-level systems will evolve into something called the cloud (essentially using S3 / EC2 / distributed services – except later on we discovered Microsoft will be launching their own competing version on similar lines to these existing products – this will apparently be good for the users as it will keep prices competitive in the marketplace).
Following Lars was Brent Hoberman, the guy who is most famous for the creation of the practically prehistoric lastminute.com which was one of the handful of truly successful companies that survived the dot com bust. He was passionate about innovation, and scathing about marketing, saying it should be the product that generates it’s own publicity. His main tips for web entrepreneurs were to remain incredibly over ambitious, to go for big markets and to create buzz with great products and constantly improving interface. He also disclosed that he is now working on another start up in home furnishing.
The ‘keynote’ (although I don’t think that word is ever used at Microsoft anymore) was delivered by an industry heavyweight. Steve Ballmer who replaced Bill Gates at the CEO of Microsoft in 2000 talked about a range of new products and introduced a demonstration of the new Silverlight, Seadragon, Popfly and Photosynth technologies/software.
Until now I hadn’t really seen Silverlight in action, but it looked similar to what Flash can already do, though I do understand it does develop on concepts. I had been initially quick to dismiss the impact this technology might have, but thinking about it, it could make a dent in Adobe’s market if people are prepared to develop applications on Windows boxes (big .NET firms) as Microsoft intends. Flash has been a bit of problem on Internet Explorer for a while due to that patent case they lost, and I can only assume the next version of the browser will be bundling Silverlight.
That said, it won’t kill Flash (too many people develop don’t use MS coding platforms), but it will be highly adopted on client machines because of this, which could let it see success.
They demo-ed some mash-up stuff too using a web based app (called Popfly, built on Silverlight) that made the whole process of linking different services look incredibly simple, but I’m still not sure of it’s relevance to the everyday user. To me it looked a little bit too much eye-candy and not enough substance for most developers, but maybe they will find a niche for it.
They also demoed SeaDragon – a technology that allows seamless browsing of vast quantities of data through streaming. It was quite impressive and the example they used was a quantity of text that would have required a table the size of Wembley Stadium and a 14 Terrapixel digital camera. Apparently Curry’s don’t stock a camera like that, but IKEA do sell that table (joke directly from MS).
Ballmer took Q&A and mentioned a few strategy points. He said Office and other Microsoft apps will never be fully web based, but will remain an amalgam of both web and installed technologies, although he discuss the streaming of software (like that Windows-in-your-browser that appeared on the web a while ago) and said categorically that they have no intention of opening up development of MS languages/tools to other platforms (although Silverlight will be deployable to Windows/OSX/Linux/Mobile).
Overall it was entertaining and he had no problem in slating Google’s advertising methods in GMail or Oracle’s databases. It made it worth listening too though. I still feel MS are not an innovative company as yet, though they do appear to be doing more and pioneering work, none of it yet appears to have made it to market. They certainly are covering all bases though; this morning they also announced collaboration spaces (Basecamp anyone?) and showed an entire raft of products to cover all needs.
Clearly Adobe are getting defensive too, with today news that they have acquired a Writely clone, maybe we will see them branching into other realms of software too.
Finally there was a panel discussion, chaired by Ryan Carson and consisting of Ben Way from Rainmakers (who appeared on Secret Millionaire if that helps put a face to a name), Saul Klein (Seedcamp) and Cary Marsh (Mydeo). It mainly discussed how to start-up, manage money and deal with failure. A good way to wrap up, but not as insightful as some of the previous discussions.
It was then lunch and the 100 or so attendees milled around eating sandwiches, canapes and drinking Microsoft bottled water (I was going to get a photo, but it looked a little odd lurking around the drinks table). There weren’t many developers there by the looks of things, mostly VCs, industry types and NCGE types, but I did bump into Jeremy Keith who was there with Andy Budd and Simon Willison. I had wanted to talk to a couple of the speakers, but as I was pressed for time I had to leave DDS to himself and head back to the trains.