Microsoft Architect Connections - Harry Pierson Keynote

Today is the day that we host the Microsoft Architect Connections event here in LA at the Omni Hotel.  Harry Pierson started the day off with a bang... no, make that a boom. 

I was floored at his keynote presentation.  First, his PowerPoint slide deck was amazing, which were basically a huge picture with a single short phrase.  The first one was really impactful, which was a giant blue power button with the phrase "The Information Age is just getting started." 

It wasn't just the slides, it was what he was talking about while the slides were showing.  Each topic was backed by the slide, but you didn't read slides to determine the point.  He spoke about taking SOA to the edge of the enterprise rather than focusing on SOA as a centralization model, taking a cue from websites or technologies that have fundamentally changed computing.  Some incredibly impactful quotes:

Software systems don't often fail spectacularly so much as they fail to succeed.  They fail because they are hard to use or don't enable the end user.

My website is bigger than your enterprise (quoting Dare Obasanjo).

Power is shifting from the center to the edge.  My laptop is 2 GHz with 2 GB RAM.  That rivals a blade server.  Count the blades at Microsoft or Google or Amazon, and that is pretty astronomical.  Now count the combined computing power from customers of Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.  That dwarfs the centralized model.  We need to take services to the edge.