I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Not long ago, when we did services, I would have been physically sick by not being at a PDC when so much new stuff is being announced.
The two sides of what did PDC deliver or not
1) Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and new UI.
2) Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar.
3) LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Cool database stuff for .NET developers.
4) Windows Presentation Foundation/E. “E” for everywhere.
5) Start.com updates released.
6) Atlas (our AJAX Web development toolkit) demoed for first time.
7) Microsoft Max. A new photo sharing and display application.
8) Digital Locker. A new place to find, try, and buy software.
9) New sidebar and gadgets and new Microsoftgadget Site.
10) Coming later today? Sparkle. A new way to build Windows applications.
11) Coming later today? Lots of server stuff.
12) Coming later today? More Office stuff.
13) Coming later today? Workflow stuff.
But now we’re doing a product the reality of the Long Tail (thanks Andy) of Enterprise Software is apparent. We still have customers running Office 2000. 5 years old, two versions old, relatively unsupported (MS: … The fix for that is upgrade to Office 2k3).
A lot of the new, shiny, things rely on the new, shiny, infrastructure and so we’re seeing an increasing Long Tail. Vista will lengthen that considerably as it will require a hardware refresh.
If you can therefore deliver the business benefits of today on 5 year old infrastructure, you’ve got a good market. There are still lots of VB6 developers out there.
As a product company, the new, shiny, stuff does not necessarily make the boat go faster.
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