Kinect. Azure. Windows Phone 7. SharePoint. SQL Server. These were but a few of things Microsoft showed off at the recently concluded Tech Ed Conference in Atlanta. In the keynotes and classrooms, and on the exhibit hall floor, there was much to capture the imagination and tickle a fancy. Here are our top five things:
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Despite numbers that show Microsoft shipped only 2.5 million phones in the first quarter of 2011 (Apple shipped 18.65 iPhones, and 35.7 million Android phones were sold), I believe Microsoft will change the market. Bringing the Office tools to the phone makes the platform more of a productivity solution, and enterprises would rather have their workers using SharePoint than Angry Birds. Of course, as workers get to dictate which devices they insist upon for use in their jobs, Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up. The Nokia partnership is a good start, but they need to step it up.
Kudos to this component vendor for having one of the coolest booths at the conference (and I don’t say that only because I was one of their “celebrity cooks” who was given the privilege of submitting a recipe and doing a book signing of their compilation “.NET Gurus Can Cook”; nor because my boss leads off their promotional video). I say it because they had a pool trick-shot artist who hit a cue ball out of a guy’s mouth and pocketed the shot, and other nifty tricks. Oh, and Grape City’s Spreadsheet component remains one of the industry’s best.
