WPC Day Two Keynote

Thanks to Owen Allen's gracious hosting of the SharePint event at Pat O'Briens last night, I was running a little behind schedule this morning, and unfortunately missed seeing Playing for Change kick off this morning's festivities.  I did make it in time to catch this morning's keynote addresses, led by Bob Muglia and Steve Ballmer.  Bob Muglia began by diving right into Microsoft's vision for cloud computing.  There has been significant coverage of this topic in broad strokes, but it was reassuring to hear how, we, the partner community fit into this evolving strategy.  Microsoft is strongly encouraging (and supporting) its partners to invest in all computing phases (datacenter, virtualization, on-premises cloud and public cloud) and develop innovative applications, solutions, and services to meet the changing landscape.  New releases of Windows7, Office 2010, System Center 2000 R2, SQL Server R2, Silverlight 3, and Expressions (to name a few) will put the possibility well within the developer's grasp.  And there is much anticipation for these releases.  Incentive and  licensing plans further sweeten the deal for the partner community.  As mentioned during the keynote, partners account for 95% of Microsoft's revenue stream, so enabling and engaging partners to develop their offerings is a critical part of Microsoft's cookbook.  Let's just say we are a tasty roux to Microsoft's gumbo.

Business Intelligence is driving Microsoft's strategy.  As Bob Muglia said, low cost of PCs, the onset of clever software and vast amounts of information have come together to create a perfect environment for innovation.  Self-service BI is just a click away.  Muglia demonstrated an Excel 2010 spreadsheet, with over 100 million rows of data, stored on his laptop.  Within 10 minutes, using neat new 2010 features like "slicers", Muglia was able to create his own BI application in Excel, pull in more data from a report, create pivot charts, and publish it for public access in SharePoint.  My head was spinning - do you know how much data we have from the Bamboo storefront, Google Analytics, CRM and Great plains?  Oh, but wait - he showed it to us in the new SharePoint Silverlight data viewer (versus a plain old list view).  Nice. Very nice.

Steve Ballmer's portion of the keynote served as a reminder that that this is a banner year for new Microsoft product releases, and demonstrates their aggressive (or what Ballmer refers to as "tenacious") positioning in the market.  Ballmer accurately refers to the recession as a "reset" and cautions that all partners be realistic in calculating performance based on revenue expectations.  Comparing 2009 revenue to previous years is just an imprecise way to assess company performance given the monumental economic changes of the past months.  He encouraged partners to look at market share and customer satisfaction as primary indicators.  Obviously, with over 1 billion Windows PC users around the world, Ballmer can easily check one of those off.

Even with his sober acknowledgement of rough economic times, Ballmer was able to carry off a very positive (and energetic) address.  He acknowledged the challenges related to the economy, but offered his thanks and encouragement that the IT community is one of the only industries that provides the promise of productivity and innovation - both corrective responses to economic turbulence. Microsoft, in turn, has commited heavily to developing innovative products: investing a total of 5.1 billion in Windows; 5.9 B in mobile; 7.6 B in communication and productivity and 9.5B in R&D.  According to Ballmer, innovation can be a powerful catalyst for change and he encouraged partners to continue to develop products for the sake of the economy.  Referring to the old Microsoft tagline "Do More with less", Ballmer suggested a new alternative: "With less, do more".