Steve Ballmer speaks and he's excited!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 06 November 2008 14:47

Opinion and Analysis

“It's kinda hard,” he answered, “not hard to run one program in the cloud – it is tough to run arbitraty code on arbitrary services in the cloud so you have the flexibility of the entire Windows platform in the cloud as part of Azure.”

He also explained that Silverlight let designers and developers work together to create and deliver apps on many devices, that you could write for data centres, the cloud or a “hoster” – but instead of needing to rewrite everything, you could just re-use the code.

Answering some questions from the audience and developers on what else we could expect from Microsoft, Ballmer also spoke of Windows Mobile 7, promising that “people would be impressed”, as he thought we would with the “next release of Windows Live coming by the end of the year”.

He said that Sharepoint Online would be embraced be developers, that fast broadband was coming to Australia at least from what he saw at the Telstra Investor Relations event where he was a speaker (in answer to question about slow broadband in Australia and how this might affect Australians getting access to the cloud), as he'd seen a demonstration of Telstra’s 21Mbps Next G network. He also expressed hope that Telstra, its competitors and the Australian Government would soon sort Australia's broadband problems out, while noting he didn't want to get political.

Ballmer also talked about BizSpark program to help start-ups get access to Microsoft’s software effectively free of charge, while placing the caveat that the program was limited and not a free-for-all for everyone.

Ballmer also made reference to the iPhone and Google’s Android platform, but claimed that developers on those platforms were “not making money”.

While we’ve all likely read stories of some developers actually doing quite well from iPhone apps and the like, not every iPhone or Android developer is raking in the cash – and certainly not at the levels that Microsoft itself is with its extensive software range.

Ballmer said that the iPhone and Android have “made it easier for devs to distribute apps” and effectively said that Microsoft would enable developers to actually make money, and that there were things he wanted to talk about but wasn’t ready to yet in this regard, and others which would be announced in the future.

Steve Ballmer was but the first speaker earlier today.

The second speaker was Gianpaolo Carraro, Senior Director, Microsoft, who spoke on “Understanding the Microsoft Cloud Platform”. This is how the session is billed: “Many, if not all of us, have heard about cloud computing, but not as many know what Microsoft is doing in the cloud. In this session we will be going through Microsoft's vision for cloud computing as well as discussing the various components of the new Microsoft cloud computing platform. Of course, cloudy demos will be shown.”

The last session was called “Amazing Software Experiences for Windows and the Web” and was presented by “Tim Sneath, Director, Microsoft”.

The session details: “Whether you're building applications for Windows or the web, Microsoft has a powerful application platform that enables you to build amazing software experiences. In this session, we'll show you how technologies like Windows 7, Live Mesh, WPF and Silverlight liberate you to build the applications you dream of.”

You can watch the entire webcast at Microsoft’s Power To Developers site in either Silverlight video, or if you click on the down arrow next to the word Silverlight, you can choose "Media Player", which naturally launches the Windows Media Player software.

Available in low, medium and high bandwidth resolutions, the Silverlight version doesn’t seem to let you fast forward, rewind or pause the video, so if you want to do that, make sure you choose the Windows Media version instead!