I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the key execs and star performers who come over from the campus.
Top of my list of highlights of the week are Chris Capossela and John B Williams, head of the Information Worker and Windows Client business groups, who give us the run down on Vista and Office 2007. Chris shows us the latest betas of these two blockbuster products.
Chris gives a really great demo. He's full of exuberance and energy. He knows his audience, their painpoints and the right buttons to press. Helpfully, all the 'buttons' work too.
His demo doesn't need any sub-titles. The scenarios he shows are everyday tasks to anyone working in our type of business environment.
He gives us a whirlwind tour around the features of Vista, Office 2007, Outlook/Exchange and SharePoint - all working together - and that integration seems to be the key point which makes the presentation so effective.
Chris' session obviously resonates to everyone in the room. I can't remember the last time I heard oohs and aahs of delight, or spontaneous applause in a demo. And the response isn't contrived corporate whooping on demand. Yes, the audience are Microsoft employees (and shareholders too, no doubt), but they are also information workers, and each little tweak shown by Chris eliminates a daily frustration, or adds a new possibility to what can be achieved.
Certainly the new products seem to bring many of those Web 2.0 tools - RSS, Wikis, social networking, etc - onto the desktop of the standard business worker and into their collaborative team environment. I wonder if this assimilation into the mainstream will take the edge off the Web 2.0 buzz?
In the months ahead there's going to be lots of noise and heat about these particular products, lots of debate from industry participants with entrenched opinions around the company and its technology. My simple takeaways are:
1. We mustn't judge these products, or any others, until we have experienced them. Let the products speak for themselves.
2. Speak to the team in our own development centre, who I know are on the Office 2007 beta program and running our own internal pilot, find out when's the right time to get this onto my laptop and what else we are doing to exploit this technology.