Back to the future?
With PDC 2008 around the corner, it got me thinking about other PDC's I attended. The first one was in 2000 when .NET first get announced (can anyone remember what it was first called?). This was in Florida and still sticks out as the best event I attended. Besides the cool content, there was a great bunch of people and nice parties (at Seaworld if I remember correctly).
The second one was in 2001, and is often known as the Hailstorm PDC. Hailstorm, aka .NET My Services, is the basis of this blog entry. The idea behind this was that we would store many of our common entities, like contacts, address information etc up on the web. The market at this time really was not ready. I can remember many people asking if these services would be available on premise rather than being hosted by Microsoft. Around that time, there was quite a bit of press around Microsoft and the court cases. Privacy was also a big deal. The interesting bit, when I reflect on this PDC, is that this would have marked some kind of entry into the SAAS (or S+S) space. At that stage, there really was no other players around, and Microsoft would have been a leader. Hailstorm more or less died. The chief architect, Mark Lucovsky, moved on. To where? Yep you guessed it - to Google.
I can remember a presentation from Bill Gates a few years ago. He talked about products and technologies and mentioned the concept of
1) The first person/company with an idea.
2) The first to implement or take the idea to market
3) The first to make money out of it.
With Hailstorm, it seemed like we were great on point (1) but probably overtaken on point (2) and (3) simply because at the time, the market was not ready for it.
At PDC 2008, we expect to hear lots of information on cloud computing. These services, I expect, will be way beyond just Hailstorm where the focus was mainly around CRUD functionality. It should be exciting.
Finally, the third PDC I attended was in 2003 where the details of Whidbey (VS05), Yukon (SQL05) and Longhorn (Vista) were provided.