"The Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects" -- Closing General Session at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona

The big presentation for me at TechEd was the closing general session.   I did an entirely new talk called "The Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects".

This talk was a LOT of work and a LOT of fun!!!   I had prepared a 30 minute version for the HPTS workshop and enjoyed the practice that this gave me.   The closing general session for TechEd (for an estimated 3000 people) was planned as a 75 minute talk with no questions.  That left a lot of material to develop to forge a full presentation.  Tracking down how to explain the reasons why processor frequencies are not increasing much (due to power constraints) took me some part time effort over the coarse of a week or ten days... Finally, I was happy with the two slide progression summarizing the drive towards many-core.  Content from Jim Gray, James Hamilton, Dave Patterson, Jan Gray, Dileep Bhandarkar, and Norm Jouppi helped tremendously as I tried to distill the forces bearing down on us in our development of software.  It seemed like the couple of weeks before the conference were hectic with me working late on talk content while working mostly on the new project during work hours.   I gave a dry run to my team at Redmond a few days before getting on the plane and that helped a lot when there were a few points of confusion that needed some extra slides to clarify.  

About 20 minutes into the talk I ran a 3 minute video which shows a vision of "Software and Services".   In this video, a construction contractor named Mike uses multiple devices to access his work and his data as he moves from his home to his car to his worksite.  My favorite portion of the video shows his tablet-like PC being destroyed by accident and yet he seamlessly borrows someone else's device and gets at his data in the cloud.

The abstract and video are attached...  It is SO great to be back presenting again!!!   I want to thank the TechEd EMEA folks for trusting me with such a cool opportunity to present!

--- Pat

ABSTRACT

There are a vast array of economic forces being unleashed on our industry today that mean we need to change how we create applications. From many core processors, low end datacenters through to the rise of ‘Pervasive Intermittent Connectivity’ and the re-definition of the Client, this session provides a unique perspective of the changing landscape and asks the question...

How we can create applications that are approachable to implementers, compose-able in their deployments, and responsive to these economic and technical forces bearing down on us?

This talk is about a vision and not about any kind of product announcements...

GEN01_The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects-071107b.pptx