PDC 2009 Part I: The Big Laptop Reveal

The Microsoft PDC 2009 conference was in Los Angeles again which was great for us since we are local. In the interest of saving money, we decided to just get one full conference pass this year. We tried not to send a bunch of staff to the conference at the same time, so we were able to just get the one day expo passes when needed.

On the first day, I picked up my badge and conference bag. This bag was really lame compared to the cool Tech-Ed bag earlier this year. You be the judge.

The conference schedule was also not printed in a book. It was on some Xeroxed piece of paper. And on top of that, there was no scheduled end-of-Conference blowout party like last year’s PDC 2008 party at Universal Studios. So the whole first day, I along with many others I spoke to were thinking that Microsoft is really tightening their belts for this one.

So, we were all taken aback during the second day keynote, when Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, announced that Microsoft was making a special Acer laptop sku available to all PDC attendees…for FREE! All the developers in the room were stunned.

This was a brilliant move by Microsoft. Instead of just giving out disks of Windows 7, they got Windows 7 on a working laptop into developer’s hands – and not an ordinary laptop – a convertible TabletPC with multitouch screen with a lot of other bells and whistles. Basically Microsoft gave developers a box to play with and develop against to take advantage of the new features in the Windows 7 platform. Here is link to some more information on the specs of the PDC 2009 laptop.

Now I kinda wish we had got our hands on additional conference passes…

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development