A Mobile Failure: Microsofts Mobility Developer Conference Leaves Europe

How anybody can say this is good news—with a straight face—beats me. Its a mark of conspicuous failure.

Look at the schedule for this years TechEd in Amsterdam. We have canal boat trips, we have Longhorn road map presentations, we have SQL Express announced, and we have "mobility tracks" as part of the schedule.

This means (quoth the PR spin merchant) "that mobility is now mainstream."

No, it doesnt. It means that we have the same number of mobile TechEd sessions here in Amsterdam as we had last year in Barcelona. And it means that the MDC has gone away.

The idea that mobility is mainstream isnt even superficially convincing. Sit through the mobility seminars, and theyre the same as last year, with minor updates. How to develop this or that. For the Windows CE platform, using standard Visual Studio software tools. Fine!—but this is ghettoism. This is like looking at the black folks at the back of the bus in the fifties, and saying theyre "fully integrated."

The giveaway: When you sit down for the Longhorn road map talk, and ask them about mobility.

I sat through the road map trip, and admired the billboards by the roadside. Here are the buzzwords, kids: Operational Infrastructure. Yum. Information Worker Infrastructure!—goody goods. Application Platform, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. All these good things ... and mobility too?

No.

Drill down: You find "high performance computing" and collaboration, and identity management, and virtualization, and branch office ... lots of lovely alphabet soup components. Mobility? "Well, automated deployment services, terminal server ..."

I did ask the weary server marketing people whether they were aware of the MDC shift. "Er, well, we dont talk to those people much," they admitted. Says it all, really.

Next Page: Mobility patch wont work.

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