Microsoft Conference in Barcelona

by Parsley Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK
Conference Review : Microsoft Tech Ed Developers, Barcelona 05/11/07-09/11/07
I found myself back in Barcelona for my annual immersion into all things computer and Microsoft. As usual they are on the move on several fronts, and it’s a lot about ‘keeping up with the Jones’: Though they were coy about admitting it, Microsoft Silverlight is competing with Macromedia Flash, and also making a play for a ‘youtube’ style role. There is also a new free-standing search product that competes with Google’s equivalent ‘search appliance’. In the wider web, they’ve spotted that the open source community (who produce things like Linux, Firefox etc.) get a load of work done by the community of users who talk to each other and can write fixes to source code. They are planning ‘wikis’ (community updated reference works online) where they will spill the beans on Microsoft products, provide example code, and invite the world to do the same.

Where will this exciting new openness lead us? Well in one example the Microsoft Vice President ‘Soma’ Somasegar suggested how useful it would be to us if our diaries would not only remind us of our wives birthdays (groans from some audience members), but also suggest & have a present ready to order for her. This would be based on your budget and selections for the last 5 years. Wow, never has it taken so little thought to appear thoughtful! Another presenter in the same ‘keynote’ presentation showed us how the great new Microsoft tools were now so brilliantly linked together that we could put blogging interfaces into our favourite games. This means we could now make it possible to drop out of a game to do some real work instead of dropping out of work and playing a game instead ! My head was swimming with the brilliance of it all.

The conference arrival notes explained that visitors to Barcelona should not show any signs of wealth (including being at the conference) to the outside world. I wondered if this was generally why the richest Americans in the world seem to have a national dress of jeans, T-shirts and trainers. It does seem best suited to them going about their tourism without being mugged.

Several Microsoft developers mentioned that they ‘try to eat their own dog food’. This was not literally what they do, but actually means that they have to use their own tools to create their own products. It’s good to know that the tools work for them, but to be honest they are probably not the typical user of their products. For instance they might at least have got to grips with the previous version before they began wrestling with the new one. It was also interesting phrasing, as if you took the analogy further you might be tempted to think that their products were a ‘dog’s dinner’.

Microsoft wants to make business users happy and apparently part of the answer they’ve found is to avoid the middlemen (IT developers) or at least emphasize that it’s their job to serve the business guys. Apparently the pesky geeky developers have been getting in the way of the brilliant business users, who would get a whole load of things done, were it not for them putting pointless objections in their way (or words to that effect!). So now all the software products are focused on business people.

An interesting historical session suggested how the growth of the internet and computing systems was like the growth of manufacturing. Ford had found how to produce a lot of things cheaply and quickly by building them all the same. This was like IBM producing PCs. General Motors then had the brain wave of changing what they produced every year so you could keep buying a new model with new features. Er…I guess this is where Microsoft come in, although they didn’t explicitly say that.

The original Microsoft vision was about putting PCs everywhere. That seems to have changed into putting a piece of software into every bit of life. I asked the workflow guys if they thought the world was ready to have all its activities controlled by software, and cited the example of call centres which tend to be rather frustrating. They pointed me at their telephony products and suggested that they just tried to make nice tools and it wasn’t their decision how people used them. It seems that in life there are more regulations and there is more fear of making mistakes. Automation is supposed to make it easier to avoid mistakes, but it also ‘de-skills’ us. We can read an answer out of a calculator, but we don’t know how it got there. Plus if the automation is as clumsy as what preceded it you then get a whole regime of mistakes. Then you beg for a new product and/or an IT expert to sort out the mess.

Some of the most illuminating talks came in a competition where inexperienced presenters were given 5 minutes to show which one of them was good enough to speak next year. The judges marked down exhibitors who took part and used it to push their own products. Pot, kettle, black, anyone?

Hotel Review: Hotel Century Park, Barcelona
This was the cheapest hotel in a decent part of Barcelona I could get with a TV in the room. I had it tuned to CNN, who are filling their interludes with ‘chiming’ music that sounds like incidental music from ‘The Prisoner’ TV show. The room was purpose-built and about as small as it could be without being unpleasant. The hotel has free internet access in reception, which is always handy.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]