Yesterday's event was the first in the series of 294 (pre)launch tours in 242 cities, 91 countries with near 200K attendees around the world. All UK launch events are now fully booked and for each delegate from Microsoft partners, there will be 18 customers attending the launch events so go figure out what the opportunities are. Originally there was one event in London on the 15th of November, which sold out in less than 24 hours so they planned for another one on the 14th. They are now thinking about holding more events in London to meet the demand so keep visiting the launch tour web site.
The event included high-level sessions on three elements of the launch: Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. They also provided some statistics on the IT market, one of which was the fact than more than 50% of developers are now using Microsoft platform (and predominantly .NET).
Right after lunch the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre had the pleasure of welcoming William Gates II [KBE], Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect. Bill talked about the timeline of computing from 1975 when it all began, then to 1985 when we had PCs and DOS, 1995 when we got GUIs and Windows and now in 2005 when we have got the tools and infrastructure to build Internet, XML, .NET and web services apps. He referred to Smart and Atlas (AJAX) clients as new wave of applications.
After Bill’s keynote there was a Q&A session with Bill. The person to ask the first question was not satisfied by greeting Bill and said to him “Let me come and shake your hand” while moving towards the stage :)
Here is a summary of some the Q&As (not an official transcript!):
Q. Who is Microsoft’s biggest competitor?
A. Many people believe it is Google, they are agile and are doing a good job at Internet search and cool tools, but we (Microsoft) will do better! Sony are good at PlayStation but we are releasing XBox 360 in December. We are competing with Blackberry and Nokia on the mobile market, and Oracle and IBM are competitors in the database market. But it is just IBM that has been a competitor for a period of over 5 years. List of Microsoft competitors changes every five years (laughing).
Bill mentioned that Microsoft needs to be more agile and innovative and has to fight organisation bureaucracy in order to avoid becoming a traditional enterprise. If Microsoft has got one enemy, then “the enemy is us”.
Q. How is Microsoft is going to sell .NET to Java developers?
A. We tell them to do one project in Java and .NET and compare their experience and productivity. The major issue with J2EE is that people talk about Java and J2EE but they are actually talking about WebSphere, etc so there is no true compatibility.
Q. Is Microsoft going to launch something similar to IBM’s global services organisations?
A. No. We believe that mentality between services and product development is different. Microsoft Consulting Services is not supposed to do the coding, they provide the high level architecture and leadership. Microsoft relies on partners to provide the services.
<Q. Do you still write code and if so in which programming language?
A. I used to write lots of machine and VB code and recently I have been playing with LINQ stuff that Andres is working on but I am writing code to understand how it works as they no longer ship the code I write!
All in all, although the event was not a technical one, but I enjoyed it a lot, especially after hearing that the audience will receive in the post a copy of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 (RTM, no time bomb!) and an exam voucher for free!