Microsoft’s Playing Catch-up
This is the third day of the Microsoft Technology Summit. I’m thankful it is only a half-day because I’m all .NETted out. That’s just the nature of these types of events; I work with Flex all day, but when I go to Max or 360|Flex, I’m all Flexed out by the end of these conferences.
There were two main things I got from this summit:
1. Microsoft is playing catchup: They know they’ve missed the boat on this generation of web developers, that is, the folks who are working with rails, django, social networks, and open technologies. To address parts of this they’re providing ASP.NET MVC (rails), Silverlight (address Flash in silverlight 1; Flex, in silverlight 2), Hibernate (parts of LINQ), and the Dynamic Language Runtime (dynamic languages). I’m not saying I’m not impressed with what they have come up with.
2. Open web: OpenID was the prominent example of an open web technology during the two days. MS is playing a significant role in defining it, but the main questions during the two days were “why is MS not doing more to push it by providing implementations and integration points in its current products?” and “why are they not leaders in this?” I think the trust issue is big, too, with many people commenting that although they appear to embrace it, are they actually doing it for the “right reason?” or is it just for the bottom line.
Thanks to all the folks that I got to talk to during the event.