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Mix06: Day One - BillG Keynote

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Today is the beginning of the first ever Mix06 conference. I am currently sitting in Dean Hachamovitch's general session about IE7 (for what its worth, he is whering a very cool "seven" t-shirt - I need one). Just prior to this was BillG's keynote. There were a lot of interesting things talked about, and I want to share a few things I found particularly interesting.

Bill talked about Microsoft's drive for what we are calling "Beyond the Browser." He talked about IE7, and the three things that he feels are the greatest advancementes in this product:

  1. Streamlined UI. The user interface of IE7 has been changed to be less intrusive, focusing the user's attention on the content (your site), not the chrome of IE.
  2. Security. IE7 now runs in low-rights mode, provides opt-in selcetion to active content, has phishing filters running on a community-driven reputation filter, and an alert for new certificates on sites requireing HTTPS (allowing the user to have greater confidence in sites with a longer history on their certificates).
  3. Platform capabilities. CSS, a commong RSS feed store, native XML of HTTP where all mentioned.

Other comments:

  • IE7 will ship with Windows Vista later this year.
  • IE7 will be a free download for Windows XP users.
  • Microsoft is already working on the next two releases on IE.
  • Applications like (and including) IE will ship on more frequent release schedules, and in some cases maybe as frequent as 6-12 months.

Bill also talked about the new Atlas libraries for running AJAX applications on ASP.NET 2.0 websites. The best news, as of today there is a Go Live license for Atlas, enabling anyinyone to run Atlas on their production websites now.

Bill invited Aber Whitecomb of MySpace.com to talk about their use of Microsoft technology to enable MySpace.com. Here are the staggerring numbers:

  • 65 million sign-ups
  • Running ASP.NET 2.0 in IIS 64-bit
  • Running SQL Server 2005 64-bit
  • When they refactored their ASP.NET code to ASP.NET and IIS 64-bit, they saw CPU usage go from 85% to 25%, and their Web Farm go from 246 machines to 150.

Interestingly enough, I think this was the first keynote I've seen that had the word "Murder" in it (the MySpace.com guys showed the Hollywood Murder space).

Ashley Highfield, the Director of New Media and Technology for the BBC joined Bill and demoed some very cool off-browser, Web-enabled applications for rich media.

Lastly, Bill invited Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media) out to interview him live on stage. It was interesting, and here a couple of paraphrased quotes from Bill that I thought were important in my life.

On Microsoft being agile:
Since the beginning of Microsoft, with BASIC, the goal has been to enable people to sit down, write a reallyn simple program and build it up into something more complex.

On releasing IE more frequently
The browser, we need to be incredibly agile with.

On community and reputation:
The whole idea of reputation becomes very important in this world.

On Web 2.0 (software as a service):
We can no longer be device-centric; we must now be user-centric.

If you at Mix06, be sure to stop by room 3501B and see a demo of the new Codezone.com site and get a free Codezone t-shirt (Monday only).

More to come later.

Tags: MIX06

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