Since arriving in the Bellevue/Redmond area I have been struck by the lack of people. Wherever I have gone it seems like the place was built for at least twice the number that are present, whether it be the shopping centers or restaurants. I wondered was it because: the others are soon to arrive half the people left Now after traveling in to the conference for a couple of days and watching the local news I have the answer, It is option 1....
So my thoughts at the end of day…. Certainly a useful day, but the conference seems a little slow. The breaks seem long,the sessions short and the breakout sessions finished quite early in the day. Maybe I am just used to the crammed in format of TechEd that go on late into the evening. On the plus side this format does give a good chance to chat to other attendees, who seem very chatty and are from a wide variety of locations across the world; though nearly all white and male, an even less diverse group than at Mix UK!...
Sitting here at the back of the Kodiak room at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond is somewhat similar to the control room at JPL which I went to on my last trip to the USA. All is can see is a sea of laptops and heads just visible over the rows of desks. It is nice to have a desk and easy access to power and Internet - all conferences should be this way....
SOA being a conference on business process is a great place to learn new words for the game of buzzword bingo, new ones to me thus far are: Onboarding - to hire staff Toast - information provided via a gadget on the desktop
After a couple of days in the Washington state my body has caught up to a manageable time zone (somewhere east of Denver I think, but that is close enough) just in time for for the start of the Microsoft SOA 2007 conference. The keynote for me highlighted that Microsoft see the future in the cloud, the Internet Service Bus (ISB) as opposed to silo’d Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). Now this assumes customers have gone down the SOA route already, which I would say is not the case in the SME market I work in....