Microsoft July 2008 Conferences

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Microsoft has an event almost every week. Especially this year, and this last month.

How many conferences and events did Microsoft hit us with? I'm not sure I could count them all, but I tried.

Imagine Cup 2008 Worldwide Finals

July 3-8; Paris, France

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008

July 7-10; Houston, Texas

Pretty boring and this lady here makes a lame attempt to be mini-Ballmer by saying, "Partners, partners, partners!" She even gets her own robot.

Microsoft makes a point that it is targeting four businesses: PC, Enterprise, Internet, and Devices. Why can't they just say Software + Services + really freaking cool Gadgets?

E3 2008

July 14 (15-17); Los Angeles, California

Microsoft showed off the "new Xbox experience", Avatars, Netflix, and a ton of games. This picture shows off the first two.

Microsoft Global Exchange 2008

July 17?!; Atlanta, Georgia

An internal (to Microsoft) event. Got rave reviews from 'softies, especially for Ray Ozzie. Probably the closest to knowing what FTP is going to be would be to have been here.

XNA Gamefest 2008

July 22-23; Seattle, Washington

DirectX 11, XNA Creators Club can now sell games, and Games for Windows - LIVE is now free. Need I say more?

Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2008

July 24; Redmond, Washington

The Financial Analyst Meeting was somewhat interesting. And it seems like the Yahoo! deal is finally completely dead.

Microsoft also cements their four targets as the PC, Server (Enterprise), Internet, and Devices, as per this slide:

Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008

July 27-29; Redmond, Washington

And the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. Innovation like this couldn't really be covered in such a brief post, so I'll make it short. Some key points I would like to point out:

• The UnMousePad - Star of the show, super touch paper that can detect multiple touches, pressure, and more. The MacBook's mousepad is doomed.
• Mobile Augmented Reality Games and Visualization - Imagine a device being able to put an alternate reality before your eyes into the environment you are in. I can imagine the limitlessssss potential. I want a Half-Life ARG, NOW!
• LucidTouch - An interesting approach to touch screens.
• Multi-Touch Spherical Display - The most anticipated part of the show; I thought the Sphere was interesting, but limited in use. Expect to see it as a globe a lot, complementing the Surface in good ways, but its usefulness in displaying flat objects is limited. Second it loses the mount, it wins.
• Windows Research Kernel - Not anything new, the Windows Research Kernel is pretty much just a pass to see massive chunks of the current Windows code branch's source code.
• Trident: A Workflow Workbench for Oceanography - The name is very misleading, as Trident is the name of the IE rendering engine. Perhaps this implies Microsoft uses a new name now?
• CHESS: Systematic Concurrency Testing - Was mentioned with Midori in a Microsoft slide a while back.

That's seven events this month, assuming I didn't miss any. That is an average of about two a week. So, I was wrong, Microsoft doesn't have an event almost every week, they have almost two!