Bill Gates gave this morning’s first keynote at PDC 05. As is

customary, he had a video to augment his presentation. These are usually

very funny, but this one didn’t do much for me (it was about Bill as a recruiter

or something, but I didn’t think they pulled it off well). However, he did

make a great comment that brought laughter from the crowd. Yesterday,

there was a significant power outage in LA as a result of a technician error

that lasted for like half an hour (I was in the air on my way so I missed

it). So Bill quipped, “You know, I’ve said many times that the software

industry needs to become as reliable as the electic utitility companies… but I

meant we should become like them, not that they should be like us.”

Bill covered some new features of Office 12 that make a lot of its existing

features much more discoverable and adds a lot of very cool features that make

customizing and formatting documents/spreadsheets/presentations much

easier. A preview of Vista showed off their gadgets which reminded me

quite a bit of Konfabulator, which I’ve

been using for a couple of months now. There will also be a lot more RSS

integration in IE7 and Vista.

Bill wrapped up with his vision of the future, which focuses on making SOA a

reliable framework that is simply assumed by application developers as a common

substrate for applications of tomorrow. He also suggested that, while in

the past MS did a great job on the client of integrating applications together

to form the MS Office suite, the next major integration they will do will be on

the server, with Windows Server System and optionally Windows Sharepoint

Services.