Microsoft Tech Summit 2018 (Day 2)

(This post originally appeared at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-tech-summit-2018-day-2-duncan-k-g-campbell/)

After day 1 of the 2018 Microsoft Tech Summit in Singapore comes, surprisingly enough, day 2.

Yesterday's Mr Jif was back, and to confuse me even more he was talking about "damons".

As irritating as it is to hear jif and damon (you can add lettooce and suchlike to the list) it was startling to find that there were so many participants at the summit who'd spoken to him for whom containers were new territory.  Indeed, from a show of hands in the venue, half of the audience had only heard of containers in the last year.

The IT press has been banging on about containers along with devops, IoT, blockchain, machine learning (whilst pretending it's AI), etc for the past few years.  Either it's just the IT press that I read, or it's just that I read the IT press and many others in the industry don't.

Choose your speaker

Next time I need to be careful about who's talks I attend.  The talks by actual engineers have demos with real content that I can appreciate.  I just need to avoid talks by "program managers" - the PowerPoint Architects of the IT presentation community.

What was out of this world?

Cosmos DB stood out.  From what the speakers described, the data model is Atom-Record-Sequence and you can access through various different models, such as MongoDB.  It has some pretty impressive performance claims, and is certainly worth further investigation.

But what about the Demo Gods?

Of course the Demo Gods struck.  There were demonstrations.  What would one expect to happen?

T-shirt?

The T-shirt rules were different this year.  Lat year you'd just to complete the evaluation form.  This year you'd to talk to one of Microsoft's on-hand experts and get a voucher that could be redeemed for a T-shirt.

I had no burning questions.

Anyway, the T-shirts I gather from conferences become instant gifts for my children.  Also, the queue for T-shirts on Day 1 was tens of yards long - I was too dumbstruck to take a photograph.

Microsoft Tech Summit 2018

(This post originally appeared at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-tech-summit-2018-duncan-k-g-campbell)

Last year I attended and wrote about the 2017 Microsoft Tech Summit in Singapore and was rather disparaging in my comments with just the slightest hints of sarcasm.  How does this year's Microsoft Tech Summit at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre compare?

The keynote's theatrics and orchestration were, thankfully, toned down a level this year.  Yes, there was the ghastly thumping music, but the coloured spotlights were toned down and the house lights were up as we entered the auditorium.  There were still the ushers with their illuminated batons like aircraft marshallers on the airport apron directing us into the chairs that were again arranged too close together for comfort.  Fortunately it was not a full house, so I could decamp to seats further back where there was a civilised degree of space for one's comfort.

How was the keynote itself?

It wasn't actually one keynote this year but two: one for Microsoft 365 and one for Azure.  The toning down of orchestration had spread to the clothing, and the tech summit corporate presenter uniform of jacket and jeans was barely evident.  Not everything was toned down from last year, as there were still the meaningless statistics presented at the start.

Sitting through the speeches in such keynotes one does wonder how to separate "predictions" from a company's product roadmap.

We also got to hear IT directors and CIOs on the stage tell us in person that using Microsoft services such as Azure were good business decisions for them, that security and flexibility were important to them and that Microsoft's offerings provided security and flexibility, etc.  I'm glad I was there to hear these insights first-hand.

It was a bit confusing at one point when one of the speakers was talking about jifs, but I did not dwell too long on that peculiar word.  I'll try to look it up later...

Each presentation was accompanied by surtitles, but the transcriber appears to be rather slow and hard of hearing.

Do Microsoft's speakers all get the same coaching?  It's truly amazing!  Is it just USAians in their ranks?  How awesome!  Or do Microsoft only select those with a certain style for public speaking?  That would be so massive, so powerful!

There were the usual videos of people (usually young and hipsterish) working on the move or from any comfy chair in their New York converted loft offices.  What they don't show are the people checking their e-mail on the loo, writing that presentation in bed just before they turn off the light, then waking up to check the spreadsheet over breakfast - with the right device you could even continue being "productive" in the shower.

Are these the images of the bedraggled, over-worked (hence unproductive) worker, or are they just people finding the times and places to do their work because their "work" hours are full of non-productive activities and are in an non-productive environment?

I do wonder about corporate videos these days: the flashy, corporate-cliched presentation; the over-loud music to remind you that something is happening even when someone's not speaking; the lack of attention paid to the audio mixing of people's voices so that you can tell what they say and they don't sound distorted.  Who approves them?  Who approves of them?

But was there any interesting content?

OK, one can now spend less time on the style of PowerPoint slides because it can automatically give you a series of corporate professional looks.  Will that mean people putting more time into the content of their presentations rather than the style?  Time will tell.

Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn has paid off: people's LinkedIn profiles are now linked to Microsoft 365.

The Azure Stack is pretty good - consistency across on-premises solutions and in-cloud solutions (so long as those are on Azure).

Last year I noted that there was only one Azure region in South America and none in Africa.  This year there's still only one in South America, but two are planned for South Africa.  So, I'm looking forward to more services coming out of Africa.  Though the location of the planned Australia "Central" region is geographically questionable.

How was the Tech Summit app this year?

It was a smoother experience this year, but who on Earth thought that dark blue text on a dark grey background was a good idea?

Can you spot it?

Do the name badges still reverse themselves?

Yes.

Microsoft Tech Summit Keynote Notes

(This post originally appeared at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-tech-summit-keynote-notes-duncan-k-g-campbell )

Today I attended the Microsoft Tech Summit held at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre in Singapore. The Tech Summit stands out compared to the last conference-like event I attended at Marina Bay Sands, unfortunately it does not stand out for the right reasons.

The first thing to stand out was the event’s code of conduct.  This code was displayed at the registration counter and consisted of several paragraphs of good intentions and exhortations that attendees should basically behave themselves like civilized adults.  It is disappointing both that people should be asked to behave civilly and for someone to think that people need to be asked to behave civilly.

The second thing to stand out was the keynote.

If there was ever a keynote to leave me in dread of the rest of event then this was it.  Someone had decided in their wisdom that some level of theatrics was in order:

• thumping music (I hope nobody had come to the event with a sore head)
• coloured spotlights
• ushers with illuminated batons squeezing everyone down into the front so that we might sit like packed sardines (or simply cattle class airline passengers) in the chairs that are always arranged too close together
• once we were all squeezed into our seats the announcement was made that “Our shown is about to begin”, which only caused my heart to sink further.

The “show” started with a ghastly promotional video of carefully selected representatives with their corporate messages booming out over the PA system. Once this was over Mr Jacket-and-Jeans appeared on the stage and spoke at a bearable volume to introduce things and present some meaningless statistics.

Next on the stage was was the main act, Mr Jacket-and-Jeans-2, a marketing person. For a “tech” summit the keynote was pretty low on tech. He even cited Über as an example adopter of Microsoft solutions – does one really want to be associated with Travis Kalanick’s pet and its toxic culture?

Some people with unknown roles were brought up to demonstrate various things. Fortunately amongst them was Mr Jacket-and-Jeans-3 who looked like he’d done this sort of thing before and so did something interesting, despite his talk being replete with marketing buzz-phrases he did at least work through something in front of the audience and interacted with it in an interesting way.

Was the keynote a ploy to make one think that nothing that happened afterwards could be as bad as it?  It was certainly a relief when it ended.

There was no conference booklet with the details of the sessions, so I relented and downloaded the app, resigning myself to not being able to quickly browse the programme of events nor to being able to make notes or other annotations.  Having downloaded the Tech Summit app it took me several attempts before I remembered my LinkedIn password so that I might log in.  Once successfully logged in the app appeared to be stuck on LinkedIn.  Each time I opened the Tech Summit app I was faced with my LinkedIn home page – what to do?  Like all good IT folk I closed the app and started it again.  This time the app decided that it would show the actual event app instead of my LinkedIn home page.

Whoever designed the app likes scrolling.  After spending quite some time scrolling through the programme I tapped the appropriate buttons to add my favoured sessions to my own schedule, but when viewing my own schedule I found none of my selected sessions have been added.  Still, the trusty tactic of closing the app and starting it again solved that problem, where “solve” in this case means scrolling through the list of sessions again whilst trying to remember what caught my eye then adding those that did and checking that they had appeared in my schedule.

Fortunately, the technical talks which followed were well presented by people who knew their subject and those sessions contained interesting material.

I am yet again presented with the question: why do conference name badges on lanyards always reverse themselves? Are they linked somehow to buttered toast (which always lands butter-side-down when dropped) and cats (which always land on their feet)? Would buttered toast attached to the reverse of a conference name badge on a lanyard force the name badge to face forwards? Would a slight spin be induced? Would the propensity for the buttered toast to seek one’s shirt be the stronger force?

 (It was also noteworthy that there are no Microsoft data centres in Africa and only one in South America.)