On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 28, 2008, after the two keynotes were delivered at the PDC, Microsoft sent out an Executive Email from Steve Ballmer. The Subject line reads: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution.
It’s a long email message but it does give the 60,000 foot view of the vision of where Microsoft wants to go. I’m not going to cut and paste the whole thing here. It starts out like this:
During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It’s a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It’s a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It’s a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.
Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. “Cloud computing” that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive data centers is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.
Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.
What’s missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn’t bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can’t we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn’t all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can’t we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?
This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond — to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us.
You can find a post of the entire message here.
Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
DiscountASP.NET