Tech.ed 2010 Experience
August 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
This year I was fortunate enough to attend teched for the very first time. It was at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre with approximately 3100 attendees. I attended 24 thought provoking sessions during the three tech-days and was blown away by the quality of the speakers and their knowledge on the subject. These sessions not only made me aware of the things that I did not know, but also highlighted things that I did not know, that I did not know.
My favourite sessions were:
- DAT306 Scalability Standouts – the biggest in the world, and how they did it by Nicholas Dritsas
- WEB202 Then things you need to succeed with Natural User Interface by August de los Reyes
- ARC204 The role of an architect in an agile team by Tom Hollander
- ARC302 The Future of Data by Graham Elliott
- ARC206 The Business of Cloud Computing by Chris Auld
- DAT311 Spatial BI by Alan Eldridge
- SEC406 Hacking: Top 5 Attacks and Defenses by Rocky Heckman
- KEY002 Locknote – How IT is changing us and our future by Miha Kralj
The consistent marketing message coming across from many presentations including the Keynote and the Locknote was the push for Cloud computing (Azure) and Phone 7. It is not easy to predict the future of these two technologies, but both of them certainly look promising. At a higher level Cloud computing makes economic sense especially for start-ups, but there are obvious risks and issues like Sovereignty, integration, and bandwidth. Phone 7 seems like Microsoft’s attempt of catching up with Apple’s Jesus Phone. Result of this competition is dependent on support from the big .NET software development community, which will either make it a good competitive product or make it another Zune.
It is too early to predict, but I believe that the catch-up game has high chances of failure. So my prediction for Phone 7 is that it is going to be another Zune. This prediction might come back and bite me, but I am going to stick with it. This is because I have seen nothing so far that gives Phone 7 a major competitive advantage over JP which already dominates the market.
I predict Microsoft competing well in the Cloud computing market and expect Azure platform to do well. Even if Azure does not succeed, the concept of cloud computing which allows businesses to change their mindset on infrastructure from CapEx to OpEx has lots of value.
For me teched was an awesome experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the company of 3099 intellectual individuals, and hope to attend this conference again in the future.
