Monday, April 30, 2007

Ray Ozzie keynote at Mix07

I just left the tail-end of the Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie keynote session at Mix07.

The session was jam-packed with folks standing at the back of the room (probably around 1,000 in attendance).

Ray was repurposing SaaS from Software as a Service to Software and a Service. It really sounds like they're embracing the approach that was first widely deployed with the iPod. Software running in the network cloud, and on the desktop (or in a browser), and on a mobile device. As Ozzie said, software 'embracing the value of the client'.

Most of the session was devoted to Silverlight and some new announcements around Silverlight design and development tools. Lots of cool demos from MLB.com, CBS, Netflix and others.

Lots of examples of rich content (especially live and streaming video) embedded in the web page. And they showed these running in IE7 and Firefox on Windows Vista and Firefox and Safari running on Mac. There also a nice demo showing a debugger running on Windows that was debugging a client session running on a Mac - that was impressive!

I also noticed an emphasis on the size of the download and the user experience in installing a Silverlight application. With broadband, it may seem that size no longer matters but remember there are still a large number of user environments (for example retail stores) that don't have a huge bandwidth connections to the client.

Scott Guthrie also pointed out several times how Silverlight is much faster for development and execution that JavaScript. He showed a simple chess program with a .NET chess player running against a JavaScript player. Silverlight 1.5 million move node calculation \versus JavaScript 500 node calculations for the same game. .NET wins. A little cheap but effective.

Today they've announced:
More later.

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posted by Bernard @ 3:06 PM

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