MIX08 First Keynote Highlights
My highlights from the morning’s keynote (Duncan’s live-blogging at TechCrunch also makes interesting reading):
Ray Ozzie’s opening remarks focussed on standards, transparency, ubiquity, interoperability, Microsoft’s intentional movement to the cloud and also towards offering competitive ad platforms for publishers as major principles / drivers of current growth and development. Signs of a new era for the Redmond juggernaut.
Microsoft Office third tier is Microsoft Office Live, after desktop and mobile apps.
Announcement of Internet Explorer 8. Some really thoughtful, powerful features included by the IE team, in response to the market. 8 points were highlighted, most outstanding for me were the integrated developer tools and new features called Activities and WebSlices.
Activities allow users to select text, like an address for example, and have a little in-browser drop-down menu automatically activate that then allows them to interact with multiple services, like eBay shopping, maps, etc. WebSlices allow users to subscribe to parts of web pages, i.e a product within an e-commerce page, etc. I’m not sure I’ve explained them well, so try out the Beta for a personal experience.
The announcement of Silverlight 2.0 with multiple demonstrations from the likes of NBC, Cirque de Soleil and Aston Martin were all very impressive.
As I write this the demo’s continue…
… and that’s the end of the keynote. Pretty cool, though nothing earth-shaking as has been rumoured by many. Time for lunch!
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Just downloaded IE8 Beta. It crashed the very first time I opened it. Some nice features included this time but it’s already playing havoc with some of the web apps I’ve written that work on all other browsers and platforms.
Hope they sort it out before the launch of the full blown version!
by Jonathan Bydendyk
on 06. Mar, 2008