Lunch with Steve Balmer

Yesterday, I (along with about 500 other people) had lunch with Steve Balmer, the Microsoft CEO at the Four Seasons hotel in the centre of Sydney. The function was a Q&A session with a well known Sydney celebrity. Steve showed why he is the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. He was engaging, interesting, even funny at times. He certainly presented significantly better in front of a business audience than he did during the previous days presentation to developers. Maybe he is happier with a business audience. I didn't come away with an improved view of Microsoft, but I did come away with an improved opinion of Steve Balmer. Experience as they say, speaks for itself and Microsoft's experience over the past 20 years showed.

Microsoft's Vision for Cloud Computing

On Thursday, I went to see Microsoft present their new Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft are arriving late to the party here with Amazon and Google well ahead of them. They are however, arriving with a different proposition and they have certainly learnt from the experiences of the two major players in the cloud computing market. Microsoft are pushing a Software + Services message rather than Software as a Service. What is the difference? Microsoft see this as putting the processing in the right place for the situation. Processing that moves, ubiquitously from desktop to server to cloud to suit the need and purpose.

This is a bold vision and a bold claim and one that their competitors do not even try to address. This maybe for good reason as Microsoft found out that evening. The live demos, only a simple text "Hello Cloud" application failed spectacularly. I never thought I would hear these words live on stage "On no, the cloud has crashed"!

Microsoft stressed many times over the course of the evening that this was early release code; they needn't have as this was clear to all 2500 developers in the conference centre!

Zachman's Enterprise Framework 2

I recently went to see John Zachman present an update to his EA framework.