Microsoft Mix Keynote One, Live From Las Vegas
11:56: That's a rap. the rumors were wrong, yet still some very impressive demonstrations and info provided. To be fair I'm not sure it needed 2 1/2 hours, but still, some interesting tech. — 11:54: Weatherbug says that they tried doing …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch is live-blogging Microsoft's first Mix conference keynote in Las Vegas — a continuation of the real-time notes format it applied to a Microsoft event back in November 2005, when the company's executive messaging was already a recurring TechCrunch beat alongside pieces like its late-2006 conversation with Bill Gates on DRM. The verdict from the room: the pre-keynote rumors were wrong, but the two-and-a-half-hour session delivered genuinely impressive demonstrations.
The pickup pattern shows what actually landed: Microsoft's Silverlight team shipped Silverlight 2 Beta 1 the day of the keynote, MIX Online highlighted a Hard Rock Memorabilia site built on the new Deep Zoom technology, and InfoWorld carried Ray Ozzie's argument that Microsoft needs Yahoo for its Web and advertising plans — three angles on one keynote, each pitched at a different audience.
First-order effects
- Silverlight 2 Beta 1 goes into developers' hands immediately, making the keynote a working software release rather than a slide deck.
- Ray Ozzie uses the Mix stage to publicly stake Microsoft's Web and advertising strategy on acquiring Yahoo, putting the deal rationale on record in front of the developer and press audience.
Second-order effects
- Adobe's Flash runtime, until now the default plug-in for rich Web experiences, faces its first fully tooled Microsoft challenger shipping in beta rather than promise form.
- Yahoo becomes the explicitly named pivot of Microsoft's consumer Web ambitions, adding a public strategic justification that raises the stakes for both companies' negotiating positions.
Third-order effects
- If Microsoft keeps using its own conferences as launch vehicles for platform runtimes, developer keynotes harden into competitive weapons in the browser plug-in and rich-Web-application layer, with audience scale — hence the Yahoo argument — deciding who controls the runtime.
The trend: Microsoft is turning its developer conferences into launch pads for Web-platform runtimes, pairing Silverlight's release cadence with an acquisition-driven answer to the audience question.