Microsoft's Next Big Thing

By Larry O'Brien

October 15, 2008 —

At the end of this month, the Windows programming world will compact itself into the halls of the LA Convention Center. For four days (five, if you include the pre-conference tutorials on Sunday, Oct. 26), Microsoft will lay out the Next Big Thing for those dedicated to using new technologies from Redmond. There will be some meaty sessions for more-conservative developers and some incremental releases of established technologies and tools, but the Professional Developers Conference is really about new stuff—the technologies Microsoft thinks will excite developers, drive innovation and create new gravity wells to draw developers to its platforms.

There will be some glitz: much more visibility into Windows 7, Silverlight demonstrations deploying rich media and dynamic languages, the Surface multi-touch display. Some of Microsoft’s most skilled presenters (Don Box could make waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles sound exciting) will bring the fuzzy “Oslo” modeling platform into sharper focus.

If there’s an overarching theme, though, it’s cloud services and Live Mesh. I’ve described this before as chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s “Internet tidal wave”—an initiative that actually deserves to be called “strategic." But while Ozzie can, in theory, dictate the course for SS Redmond, Live Mesh won’t succeed unless the development community embraces it.

The problem is that today’s mainstream developers are generally looking for more incremental technologies, particularly in corporate settings. The hardware environment has stabilized; the manycore era may be upon us, but the penny has not dropped in enough minds. For most teams, 2008 looks an awfully lot like 2003: a couple of gigahertz of speed, a couple of gigabytes of RAM, keyboard, mouse and 1024x768.

That complacency doesn’t bode well for Microsoft. Incremental improvements are more likely to come from small companies, not large ones, and the clamor of the Microsoft haters is sufficient to ensure that Redmond gets little benefit from releasing technologies that are as good as, or only marginally better than, the alternatives. Microsoft needs something like cloud computing—something that’s big and complex enough to make Microsoft’s size an advantage, but that won’t require a leap of faith to a new type of hardware (even if such a shift is a certainty, as is the case with manycore).

Microsoft’s hardware predictions have been off the mark in the past decade, with the TabletPC, Zune, Sideshow auxiliary displays and Windows Mobile all having failed to catch the imagination of a broad development community. (I would like to believe that Surface can buck the tide of recent history, but given the high prices being bandied about, it looks like “desktop computing” isn’t going to be redefined anytime soon.)

In my earlier column, I suggested that the low-key launch and complex architectural diagram for Live Mesh made the technology seem like an elephant described by blind men. But “cloud services” is the single most-used tag in the PDC session list. This may be a proxy for its importance to Microsoft, since the competition for speaking slots at PDC is fierce.

By the same logic, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is, for the second PDC in a row, the technology with the biggest attention gap between Microsoft’s emphasis and the real-world buzz. At the last PDC (held in 2005), WF sessions were crowded, and booksellers told me that it was one of the hit topics. The preliminary session list for the PDC has more sessions on Workflow than on parallelism.

The final PDC session list is always fleshed out at the end of the first keynote by a slew of sessions on just-revealed technologies, and were I a betting man, I’d travel to Los Angeles with an awfully large partition open on my laptop and no plans for sleeping on Monday night. Actually, sleep is always best deferred at PDC; Microsoft spares no expense at the after-hour parties, and birds-of-a-feather meetings often get started at midnight.

The PDC is expensive and its pace can be grueling. But it’s the premier conference for advanced developers targeting Microsoft platforms, and it’s absolutely worth the investment.

See you there!

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Related Search Term(s): Windows, Microsoft

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