Keynotes at Microsoft TechEd events always get underway with an upbeat flourish, and yesterday’s keynote for Microsoft TechEd 2010 Australia – “Potential Unleashed” – on the Gold Coast was no exception, with a live DJ on stage pumping out a happy mix of eurotrance to the 2700 assembled delegates, partners, speakers and media.
The keynote live DJ - not Wyatt Roy
Michael Kordahi (aka the Delicate Genius) got the proceedings underway in his usual flamboyant and ebullient style, before introducing the main keynote speaker, August de los Reyes. August is Microsoft’s former Principal Director of User Experience for the Surface project (and also designed the Windows key found on every PC keyboard).
Delicate Genius in full flight
August offered a unique insight in the rarefied world of designing intuitive technology – the abstract and seemingly disconnected thought processes which are required to gain greater understanding of what makes us tick as humans, what we naturally respond to, and how to translate that understanding into working products.
August de los Reyes - a beautiful mind
Presenting a wide-ranging discussion which touched on natural aesthetics, linguistics, pattern recognition and cross-cultural interpretations, August delivered a mesmerising presentation which appealed strongly to both developers and IT professionals.
MK and Andrew Coates took to the stage next, delivering the same Surface/Windows Phone/Windows Client interoperability demo first seen at REMIX10 in Melbourne back in June. Leveraging off the unified backend of the cloud, the demo showed how rich user-relevant data can be shared, accessed and interacted with across disparate platforms with ease, extending the computing experience seamlessely to the “many screens” paradigm.
The remaining presentations during the keynote revolved around the latest developments in the Windows Phone 7 platform, including XNA-based game development and integration with Xbox Live and some of the recent applications created by developers, and an on-stage demo of Microsoft Kinect, the body/movement recognition device soon to be released for the Xbox.
While the demos were undeniably interesting, there was a notable lack of content pitched towards IT professionals – strange, given the imminence of Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 SP1 which brings new features like Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX; both significant enhancements to Microsoft’s server product suite, as well as recent and upcoming releases in the System Center suite.
This was surprising given that TechEd has long been established as an education event for IT professionals, and that so many of the event tracks DO focus on these recent developments. On balance the keynote was, rather disappointingly, heavily skewed towards developers and consumer technology, and certainly feedback from the #auteched Twitter stream bore out the fact that many IT professional delegates were losing interest, despite the undeniable “cool” factor and content quality.
Disclaimer: I am attending Microsoft TechEd as Microsoft’s guest.
