Microsoft to replace Mix with a new developer conference
Summary: Microsoft is doing away with its annual Mix designer/developer event. This year, instead, the company is planning a developer conference likely to focus on Windows 8. — The rumors were true: Microsoft is doing away …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mix has been Microsoft's designer-plus-developer gathering since the late 2000s — the stage where it showed off IE 8 and Silverlight 3 in 2009 and where Windows Phone 7's Silverlight-and-XNA story got its developer briefing in 2010. But the company already signaled where its event strategy was heading when it teased the Build developer conference in mid-2011, a single-platform event built around one big bet rather than a broad web-and-tools agenda.
Killing Mix and replacing it with a developer conference likely centered on Windows 8 completes that pivot: Microsoft is collapsing its scattered designer/developer events into launch-focused showcases for its next operating system. For a company about to ask developers to learn a new app model, controlling the message at its own dedicated event matters more than maintaining a generalist web-community fixture.
First-order effects
- Mix attendees — the designers and web developers who made up its audience — lose their annual venue, and Microsoft's event calendar now funnels them toward a Windows 8-centric conference instead.
- The new conference gives Microsoft a controlled stage for the Windows 8 developer pitch, unencumbered by Mix's legacy agenda of web standards and Silverlight sessions.
Second-order effects
- Silverlight's ecosystem takes another signal of decline: Mix was the technology's traditional showcase, and removing the event removes its most visible home just as Windows 8 pushes a different app model.
- Rival platforms' developer events become the alternative destination for the designers Mix used to attract, raising the stakes on Apple's and Google's own conference programming for that audience.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major-vendor developer conferences consolidate from community gatherings into product-launch vehicles tied to OS release cycles, with each event existing to recruit developers to one platform's next version.
- Designer-developer crossover events like Mix may not survive anywhere in big-vendor land, splitting those communities between engineering-focused platform conferences and separate design gatherings.
The trend: Vendor developer conferences are shifting from cross-cutting community events toward single-platform launch showcases keyed to operating-system cycles, with Microsoft folding Mix into a Windows 8-focused successor after Build set the template in 2011.