PDC is not Just the Windows 7 Show

Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) kicks off next Monday in Los Angeles, and all of the attention and interest is on Windows 7, the successor to Microsoft’s ill-received Vista.

The thing is, this show is not the Windows Developer Conference. There’s more than just Windows 7 on the agenda, which will be discussed in just 21 of the 194 sessions. So what else will Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) talk about?

How about Windows Server 2008? Silverlight? .Net Framework 4.0? Microsoft’s software+services strategy? There’s plenty to cover, and Directions on Microsoft analyst Mike Cherry believes Windows 7 won’t be the dominant topic of discussion because Win7 is not a radical change from Vista.

“If Microsoft is making any significant changes, then they need to give developers some lead time to adopt those changes so they can run their applications,” he told InternetNews.com. “Windows 7 won’t have that many changes. Vista introduced a lot of change, and they can’t afford to have that kind of disruption twice in a row. ”

He said PDC is often used to cover big changes well in advance of their introduction. One of the first PDC shows was to highlight the introduction of the Win32 API, since developers up to that point had been writing 16-bit Windows apps on MS-DOS and the move to 32-bit was a radical change.

Likewise, Cherry expects that any changes discussed for Windows Server 2008 will be incremental and not get a lot of play at PDC. He expects software-as-a-service, or software-plus-services, as Microsoft likes to call it, to dominate.

“Microsoft will be trying to convince people that writing for Microsoft’s SaaS platform makes more sense than writing for Amazon’s or Google’s or anyone else’s,” said Cherry.

Martin Reynolds, vice president and research fellow with Gartner, also expects to see some SaaS-related news. “We know they are investing heavily in the infrastructure and technology to build cloud computing, obviously it’s time for people to start using it,” he told InternetNews.com.

Ahead of the cloud

Cloud computing requires a different kind of application development, so PDC is the show to give developers that guidance. “These applications don’t just happen. They need to be thought out, tested and deployed. So you need to be well ahead of the curve,” said Reynolds.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020