This article should have started "sitting here at the Ballmer's keynote at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver". Instead, I'm writing it from my home office a day late before I head back up.

Before I start I need to point out that I work with Microsoft in their partner program. I'm committed to that. Microsoft technologies and products play a big part in the enterprise and will continue to do so. It's not going away. Microsoft often have some "negative" things to say about certain products etc. of their partners so I think it's okay for me to be critical if it's constructive and can lead to better products. (Also see the disclaimer about these being my opinions and not that of my company on the right ;-)

Yesterday I was listening to Mr. Ballmer talk about "optimized desktops" and "enabling people to realize their potential" (never mind that the promise of technology to help people realize their potential seems a bit of a stretch). While I was listening I was shaking my head in disappointment. I had wanted this to be a positive upbeat, experience but what had just happened to me had already soured my perspective.

You see I decided to leave my Mac at home and be a good corporate citizen and take my newer Dell/Microsoft Vista laptop. Sigh, what a mistake. Those of you that own a Mac, know how easy it is to just connect to the internet, especially on WiFi. Well I had being in the main conf. dining area with my Vista laptop trying to connect for an hour. I've seen colleagues with this problem before. Now I was experiencing it first hand. You see I made the mistake of just putting my laptop to sleep and then opening it, reawakening it (always hit-or-miss IMO) and trying to connect. Well Vista couldn't see the WiFi at the conf. center. I scoured the conference information book to see if there was some SSID I was supposed to be using. I then decided that perhaps the Colorado Conference Center was a little behind and I had to be somewhere special Microsoft's Blue Lounge for WiFi access. I headed outside the dining area.

As I left the dining area I noticed some people sitting around with laptops and asked if they were online. "Sure" they said. hmmmm... Of course! I remembered. This is still Windows! See my problem was that I expected more from Vista in this area. But I needed to reboot. Of course, I couldn't wake my laptop from sleep - hey, sometimes it wakes sometimes it doesn't you just don't know. I tried everything and then I decided that I was going to reboot anyway I might a well do the horrible hard boot by holding down the power button - not elegant but some things don't change. (For those of you shutting "user error, user error" remember I have two degrees in computer science (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) and have been working on computers since before 1984 in some way or other. I've programmed Windows, Solaris, Cray, IBM Mainframe, HP/UX, AIX, OS X, Linux .....)

After the hard reboot sure enough there was the WiFi hotspot MSFTINET. Yea! I connected! But woops, gotta go into see Mr. Ballmer's keynote. Hopefully the laptop will remember MSFTINET. Well when I got around to the overflow room - my delay contributed to missing the main hall - I discovered that MSFTINET was not visible from here. But that's fine there was MSFTEVENT and MSFTWAN and some others. Forget it. No luck. I closed my laptop disappointed and instead watched Mr. Ballmer jump around the stage like a rock star. Fair play to him - he's a lot to be excited about.

Ballmer talked about how Microsoft was once a desktop company and still is but that was once perceived as not-an-Enterprise-company. However now they are told how they can be a "better enterprise company", inferring that they are at least an enterprise company now. I think that is very fair- there is no denying that fact. Microsoft are a very strong enterprise company. Sun and HP have slipped up in this area. IBM are still very strong. But I couldn't help thinking, "you could still be a better desktop/laptop company". Now maybe I'm being unfair perhaps this is a Dell problem.

So enough about the negative experience. Here are some of the positives. Ballmer introduced Sliverlight a "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." The technology walkthrough and demo, performed by someone else (I'm ashamed I can't remember their name) was very impressive. Actually I decided to download it on my Mac today to see it work. Some bad news for Microsoft - I promise this was supposed to be a positive section - it wouldn't install on Safari. The install reported that I required "10.4.8 or higher" to install and so it wouldn't install. Well I have 10.4.10!!! Come on guys (MS)!!! I wanted to try this out and say really positive stuff! Anyway I'm sure this is a small glitch. I'll try it on Vista later or on Firefox. It looked really slick.

Microsoft also talked about the Cloud Platform - a place for developing new service based applications etc. Hmmm... we (at IONA) have been talking about the cloud for about 3 years. Sounds very familiar.

So I really need to say something completely positive with no negative strings. Ah yes, I saw Surface. I had seen a YouTube demo of this technology (or like technology ? ) some years ago. It is so very very cool. Honestly it's the type of technology and product you'd expect from Apple. Congratulations to Microsoft for swooping this up. Reader, if you haven't seen this yet check out the cool promotion demos here. (Skip the introduction).

So tonight, if they'll still let me, I'll be seeing Earth Wind and Fire at one of the Microsoft events. Oh you thought that "After the Love is Gone" was about Vista. No, it's one of my favorite EW&F hits.

Update: Sigh. So it's not Earth Wind and Fire but instead Earth Wind Fire and Water, a cover/tribute band. Did someone say, After the Love is Gone?

Update: Went to a Silverlight presentation and afterwards mentioned the trouble with downloading Silverlight on Safari (I said it privately not in the general Q&A) The guy blew me off with "well it's beta!". Well don't waste my time! It could easily have checked my browser and said not to bother downloading cause it doesn't really support OS X in beta. (BTW it wouldn't load for Firefox on OS X either) Instead I went through the download process to get the crazy message. BTW the Silverlight demo called Top Banana was really cool. Beau from Metaliq said that the development was remarkably easy. They did say that Silverlight will not support WCF.