Bill Gates Keynote at ODC 2008
I just got back from the Bill Gates keynote at ODC 2008 and wanted to share some tidbits.
This is the second time I've heard Bill speak, and both times I found the Q&A session to be a very valuable part of the keynote. Some conference attendees got a chance to ask Bill some questions and express some frustrations with developing around Office and SharePoint.
Here are some of the more interesting point that came out of the Q&A:
- Office 14
- Microsoft is hard at work on Office 14 (looks like we're skipping v13)
- Office 14 will contain a major "Office in the cloud" piece where there will be web versions of programs such as Word, Excel, etc.
- Bill acknowledged that these wouldn't be as feature-rich, but would contain enough functionality for the most common tasks, e.g. OWA vs. Outlook
- SharePoint
- He acknowledged that SharePoint 2007's success caught Microsoft a little by surprise
- They're doing their best to catch up on documentation and developer tool support
- Increased staffing in SharePoint product support
- Future support for enabling Lists to use their own SQL tables for storage
- Apple
- He pointed out that a lot of effort was made to "Apple'ify" Office 2008 for the Mac
- As a result, there are no plans to support things such as VBA and Ribbon extensibility in Office 2008 for the Mac
- This comment came as a result of someone asking if Microsoft would eventually provide support for programming against the object model in Office 2008 for the Mac
Overall, I was impressed by how everybody who asked a question got a straight and informed answer. Well, except the host who asked: "What's up with Yahoo?"