Company Meeting

Microsoft's Company Meeting was today -- and it was a special one at that. This year, Microsoft celebrated it's 30 year anniversary. Pretty amazing that Bill's dream of a computer on every desk and in every home is so close to be achieved...

In addition to hearing from Bill and Steve, all three of the new Microsoft Presidents got up in from of the 16,000 Redmond based employees (+thousands of others watching on the web cast) and showed off some of the coolest things coming out soon from our long hours of hard work. There were some pretty incredible demos. The top 5 things I saw at the meeting were:

  1. The new Office -- The UI looks very efficient. The new features in Outlook, Excel, and Powerpoint are enough to make my mouth water.
  2. Windows Vista -- Jim Alchin demo'd vista himself, and he did so very quickly in rapid succession. I think we must have seen 30 different things in 20 minutes.
  3. Virtual Earth -- Some of the new advances that they're going to come out with soon are really cool.
  4. XBOX 360 --  Need I say more?
  5. Windows Mobile 5.0 -- There are some incredible handsets coming out soon. Check the news tomorrow for another important announcement on this front...

I wish I could say more, but I'm not sure what's been publicized and what hasn't. But suffice it to say, that I'm stoked! I love Microsoft. I can't believe I am so lucky to work in such an amazing place.

After the presentations, there was a product fair. I didn't get to see much of the product fair because I was too busy demonstrating all the cool features of Windows Speech Recognition to my fellow employees. In the product fair, there were probably about 80 or so stations that different teams had set up, and I had one of them, with my two friends, Oscar and Andrew. I did most of the demoing and they talked to people that weren't able to get up to the demo station where I was.

Seemingly, everybody that saw the demo was blown away. The most common question after watching the demo was, "Is this in the main builds?" (referring to the availability of the feature for other teams inside Windows) and "Can I start using this now?" I really liked those questions. It was fun! I was quite proud our team's efforts of the last couple years. Good job guys!!