A Method to the Madness

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I hear from press, analyst, customers, partners, and even friends that Microsoft can be a bit noisy in the marketplace with product launches, betas, CTPs, RCs, etc. and sometimes it’s hard to make sense of it all. We understand and do in fact put a lot of products into the marketplace and don’t always do a good job of linking the individual pieces of news back to a bigger strategy. We are working on this and our strategy has evolved from conversations with customers and partners which typically end up going down one of two paths:

1. Places that people would like help relative to the things they deal with daily -- managing complexity, security, alignment with the business, and empowering end users.

2. Technology trends in the industry and our investments and strategies around virtualization, modeling, services, RIA’s, etc.

We think of the work being done to align technology investments to meet the core IT Pro/Dev pain points as enabling a Dynamic IT environment. We covered this in some depth at TechEd last June and we disclosed more on this with the Oslo announcement earlier this week.

 

As we get further into conversations we generally split around IT-led discussions which pivot on core infrastructure and developer-led discussions which pivot on the application platform. Our group focuses on the latter and enabling a series of capabilities that live above the core infrastructure which is key to the creation, management, running, and deployment of applications. We then move to the top areas of interest that enable the alignment of IT/Dev and business: Business Intelligence, Data Management, SOA/Business Process, User Experience and Development.

 

This week, our news focused on SOA/Business Process with the announcement of Oslo, a new set of technologies for model-driven design. Next week we are off to TechEd, IT Forum and DevConnections where we will have news, demos and sessions related to Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 which maps to development and data management capabilities. All of these announcements align to the individual capabilities which in turn supports the overall  Application Platform  effort. So as news comes out, piece by piece, know that it’s all part of our longer-term effort to build the best platform