The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 (WPC09) was kicked off in New Orleans today with Alison Watson, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group, talking about the research that was done within Microsoft to tackle the current “economic reset”.
Watson said that three things emerged as markers of the companies who had successfully traversed such times in the past. A clear and consistent vision, self belief that is reflected through marketing and an intense focus on salesmanship, said Watson, were the key strands that underpinned success in adversity.
Showbiz
The combination of those elements provided the subsequent style of all the key notes on the opening morning of the conference, with no small amount of showbiz supporting the core messaging. Make no mistake, this is an important year for Microsoft and resources have been committed.
One of Watson’s main announcements was related to the new Partner network, superseding the old Ms Partner Program, that would have an increased emphasis on skills and competencies to increase capabilities among partner companies.
Social media
Among some of the goals expressed within this drive, was a common refrain among enterprises as Watson said, “I wish that social media would work for business”. Indeed a graphic demonstration of the power and penetration of social media was seen a little later as Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division, attempted to do an Office Communications Server based demo that went awry with a failure message appearing for all to see.
Within minutes, and as Elop demonstrated a Dynamics extension to embrace social media, there were Tweets from the attendees describing the failure earlier.
With social media, there is no place to hide.
Windows 7
Obviously, Windows 7 (W7), is a major step for Microsoft and one gets the impression that it has been out for some time despite general availability being some way off. One of the partner companies that spoke during the presentation by Bill Veghte, senior vice president, Windows Business Group, said that at the moment his company was rolling out W7 to a law firm in the US for 700 users.
In fact as Veghte demonstrated some of the new features around W7, such as the peak button that allows users to see different elements of the desktop and open applications through transparencies, snapped views and previews, one got the distinct impression that the almost indecent rush to W7 is only further criticism of the near universally disliked Vista.
Despite Vista being not all bad, W7 is clearly the favoured son and the single greatest feature of Vista now appears to be its easy migration path to W7.
Perhaps the nicest feature that was demo’ed this morning in the W7 Pro version, aimed largely at small business, is the XP virtualisation capability. Veghte said that with every W7 Pro licence comes an XP virtual machine licence. This allows XP and pre-XP applications to be run inside a VM ensuring that backwards compatibility is taken care of in a way that does not compromise the forward looking capabilities of the new operating system.
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