Keynote shows
Microsoft's maturity
 Think about the keynote we've just had from Anders.
He spent his time trying to give us the vision behind his work; he focused
on trying to tell us how he (and Microsoft) feels our jobs, as developers,
will change in the near future.
Now at this point you're probably confused. You’re thinking..."Well of
course he did that, what else would you expect?" A fair question, but not if
you attended Oracle Openworld in Berlin two weeks ago where Larry Ellison
gave the main keynote. Given the very recent release of Oracle 9i, he had a
golden opportunity to tell the attendees how it would shape their futures.
And, in truth, he did touch on that; he just didn't spend much time on the
subject. Instead he focused on attacking IBM's DB2 - to the point of running
a live demo which showed a shared-nothing clustered database dying a lonely
and messy death when one of its nodes failed. Oracle 9i (as you may by now
have guessed) uses a shared disk architecture and survived the failure. Of
course, a shared-nothing cluster can be made resilient to single-node
failure, but that wasn't mentioned.
As a keynote it was very frustrating to attend. I don't need to be
told that Larry doesn't like the opposition, I've known that for years. I go
to keynotes for visions of the future, not re-iterations of the past.
Of course, the fact that Anders is genuinely enthusiastic about his
work, and is even prepared to mention competing companies with affection is
no guarantee whatsoever that .NET will change the world. And we also have to
remember that Microsoft has been guilty of running down the opposition in
the past.
Nevertheless the company’s current relaxed
attitude to the competition demonstrates a level of faith in its own
technology that is encouraging for developers who are being asked (as
developers always are) to invest their own time in the future.
|
 Keynote interview: Anders Hejlsberg
Keynote comment: Jon Honeyball
speculates on the future of SQL Server
|
