Did They Spend It All on aQuantive?

K

  evin Conroy of Microsoft sent me an e-mail this morning, informing me (and all the other PDC Partners) that PDC is being "rescheduled."

The reason in the e-mail is that:

By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term.

It's not clear exactly what this means--they don't want to have a conference to pimp stuff we can actually play with? Nagel got pissed at them for stealing his art for their logo? They can't afford PDC because they spent so much on aQuantive?

Well, it's disappointing. PDC is a great conference, filled with intelligent people. It's rewarding as a partner to go see what's new and what people are doing (both from Microsoft and from other partners). I was looking forward to it.

Microsoft has more new development tools available now than ever before in their history. .NET 3.0 is still new, and the virtues of WPF, WCF, WF and InfoCardSpace (or whatever they ended up calling it) can still be sung to the partners. And certainly Orcas and Silverlight deserve close looks and more education.

I think it's a shame--and I'll be sure to let them know that at the Worldwide Partner Conference in July.

Technorati tags: microsoft, pdc

I Should Take My Own Advice!

L

  ast November I posted about Google's YouTube acquisition, and contrasted what YouTube was doing with what Amazon was doing. I felt (and feel) that Amazon's web offerings were technologically much more interesting than YouTube's.

Beside some interesting comments (lost in the ether now that I've switched to Haloscan comments), there was another surprising result: some folks took my technology advice and got all financial with it. They sold GOOG and bought AMZN. Bill Boebel blogged about his decision here.

Two days ago I got an IM from one of my oldest friends: "Did I ever tell you that, after reading one of your blog posts last fall, I bought some Amazon stock?" He hadn't, so I looked up the stock.

Wow. When will I start taking my own advice?

Technorati tags: amazon, google

HPC in Finance Event in SF

R

  eady to learn everything you've always wanted to know about HPC and Finance but were afraid to ask? Do you live on the West Coast and find the JetBlue flight to all of those conferences in New York just too daunting?

Great news--here's your chance to hear Microsoft, HP, and Digipede together talking about the wonderful worlds of HPC and Finance.

Here are some details:

On Tuesday, May 15, Microsoft, Digipede Technologies, HP, and other Microsoft partners will host a half-day informational event in San Francisco on High-Performance Computing (HPC) in Financial Services, describing how to achieve faster “time to insight” from computationally intensive financial applications.

We’ll run through some real-world examples of how our financial services customers use the HP / Microsoft / Digipede solution to make more money by dramatically improving application performance and scalability. Such applications include risk management, trading analytics, wealth management, and many other lucrative areas. We’ll present information on how the Digipede Network integrates with and adds value to HP clusters and servers, as well as Microsoft’s entire technology stack, including the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), Visual Studio 2005, .NET, Excel 2007, SharePoint 2007, and more.

Date: Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Time: Welcome, 8:30; event 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Location: The Landmark at One Market Street, San Francisco, CA (That’s Microsoft’s San Francisco office – in the Golden Gate conference room).

Registration and other details can be found here.

Technorati tags: hpc, digipede, hp, microsoft

Back on the grid!

R

  eports of my demise are greatly exaggerated! Yes, I took 3 weeks off of blogging (in fact, I took 3 weeks off--I had an incredible European vacation, and if this were a travel blog you would have been reading amazing accounts of Barcelona, Sicily, and France).

I also spent a big chunk of last week in the Big Apple (what better way to reacquaint my internal clock with West coast time than to spend 3 days on the East coast?) attending Microsoft's Financial Services Developer Conference. For a brief writeup, see Marc Jacobs's summary (he didn't see anything new--then again, he knows our stuff very well).

By the way--for my readers who read and write about parallel and distributed computing: if you haven't added Marc's blog to your feed reader yet, you are missing out on the best writer out there who happens to write about distributed computing. He's scary smart technically and has a fantastic way of putting his thoughts down in English.

I hope to get back on the blogging bandwagon forthwith--the only things in my way are an interim feature release, an impending Digipede Network 2.0 release (nothing like hundreds of pages of documentation to make you wish you had scaled back the feature list!), and an ever-growing client list.

Upon my return, I had thousands of items in FeedDemon. Combing through them, I've seen some interesting reads on distributed computing--I hope to have some comments posted soon.

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede