PDC Keynote

It’s probably too early to know what to make of the technical content shown during the keynote. Presentationally, though, it was classic. What with showing the Red vs Blue PDC movie that we probably mostly saw a few weeks ago, and a fantastic VH1 rip-off “Behind the Technology” movie, Microsoft really know how to send themselves up.

Gates was typically calm, measured and understated, while the Don and Chris double-act was animated, amusing, oh and probably involved more different text editors than most people will have seen in one session.

My first reaction to the Avalon bits is probably predictable: do we really need any more ways to make fancy alpha-blended eye candy? I think we need to keep in mind one subtle point that Bill made: this stuff is being developed for the hardware we will have in 2 or 3 years time. We’ll have much more screen space and I’m looking forward to my 26” desktop LCD!

I think it will take some time for the implications of WinFS to become apparent. Nothing we’ve been shown so far suggests anything very radical, but I think having a centrally concentrated data store will probably lead to applications we haven’t really thought of yet.

Finally, too little was shown about Indigo to really understand how it all hangs together. Suffice it to say that this is an area that I want to learn more about - it looks quite involved - and I imagine the “coolness” will become more apparent once we start looking at how to code against it.