Microsoft Technology Summit 2008 – Conclusions

These dated notes went missing for a while, but have been recovered.  Although their relevance is greatly diminished, I’m posting them anyway for anyone trying to find out what MTS is about.

This is my third post on the Microsoft Technology Summit which I attended on Microsoft’s Redmond campus.  This post contains my overall observations on the summit and Microsoft’s motivations for hosting it.  My summaries of the first two days of sessions can be found here and here.  MTS is a conference of technologists and bloggers invited by Microsoft to hear updates about various Microsoft products and initiatives and to provide feedback. Most of the attendees are experts in technologies and communities that aren’t closely, if at all, associated with Microsoft.  Full disclosure: Microsoft paid for my travel, lodging and food during the summit.

Why did Microsoft do this?
The summit was an interesting beast.  It was a really interesting group of bloggers and developers from all over the world listening and commenting on a set of topics all related to Microsoft technology.  Most of the attendees were not likely to be users of the technology and in fact could be described as critics.

So the big question we all had going in to the summit was “why is Microsoft doing this?”  Sado-masochistic tendencies didn’t seem to be a likely answer.  One common notion led to the IRC back-channel at the summit being set up as #brainwashcamp.  However, I think there were several motivations for holding the summit:
1.  Feedback – I do believe that some folks at Microsoft really do want to hear what the company’s critics have to say in an effort to improve the company.  The summit could be viewed as an effort to compile feedback from non-Microsoft thought leaders and distribute it internally.
2.  Exposing MS leaders to criticism – This summit was my first internal perspective on Microsoft, and one revelation I had was something that should have been obvious beforehand if I had thought about it: Microsoft is a huge company with many different groups and agendas.  A lot of groups do their own thing and the agendas don’t always line up.  I got to wondering if one motivation of the group that organized the summit (Sam Ramji’s Platform Strategy group from what I could tell) was to line up leaders from internal Microsoft teams and then ambush them with the (at times very) critical opinions that would certainly come from the people who had been invited to attend.  Sometimes you don’t listen to differing opinions from those in your family and it takes an outsider to open your eyes to your own faults.
3.  Goodwill generation – It’s hard to hold a broadly negative opinion of an organization once you’ve met some nice people who are a part of it.  I don’t know that the summit could (or did) change anyone’s mind about specific criticisms they had of Microsoft’s technologies and policies, but it’s indisputable that some of the Microsofties are nice, intelligent, honest people who just want to do their job well and improve their company.  I’m sure many people, myself included, left the summit with an opinion of Microsoft that, if not more positive, was at least more nuanced and less monolithic.
4.  BrainwashCamp – It’s impossible to dismiss the idea that on some level, Microsoft would hope that some attendees would leave with a positive opinion of Microsoft’s policies and wanting to use some of their technology.  They probably are not naive enough for that to be the only motivation in holding the summit, but it’s likely that there was some hope that people’s minds could be changed.

People had different attitudes during the summit.  Some were downright snarky and took every opportunity to needle the presenters.  Others were less vocal but clearly disagreed fundamentally with Microsoft’s positions on pretty much everything; they disassociated themselves from presentations as the summit went on.  Some attendees paid attention to the presentations, but didn’t provide much feedback, and some consistently asked questions, offered insights and constructively criticized the presenter’s points.

Of course everyone had their unique perspective.  I talked to Joris Komen who is responsible for rolling out computers to schools in rural Namibia.  His biggest problem with Microsoft is that the only way to get hot fixes for Windows is to have each computer independently run Windows Update and download the patches from Microsoft’s US servers.  Bandwidth costs in rural Namibia are exorbitant, and many areas only have 4Kbps connections.  Patch Tuesday saturates these networks and result in huge bandwidth bills.  Not surprisingly, this kind of issue was not discussed at the summit, but it was a very interesting reminder that not everyone is worried about rich internet applications, social networking, and the latest language features.

Microsoft did request feedback on the summit format, and the most vocal comment was that the summit should be run as a barcamp.  When the group was asked who would attend next year if a barcamp format was used, it was hard to find a hand that wasn’t up.  It would be interesting to know if Microsoft takes that advice for MTS09.

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