I planned to physically attend the annual company meeting, especially as it was at the McCaw Opera Hall and there were limited tickets (I had a ticket) but my schedule is running over so I decided to go virtual and multi-task with attending the Company Meeting on-line live broadcast; while working in Redmond. But even on the internal company neywork, there was definitely a good high voltage energy to the meeting coming through; none of that simple 120volt stuff.

It's an internal company meeting so I'm not going to do a news report, and I'm sure there will be some media news in the press today somewhere about it, but some impressions I took away from the meeting.

BillG made some nice comments about Google being 'cool', Apple helping bring the digital mobile music industry potential together, Microsoft's committtment to a basic architectural approach to solving complexity, on Longhorn with the dream of 'unified storage .. being the holy grail' and WinFS still very much alive, on SP2 getting out, and on Microsoft R&D being the $6 billion question that's helping us get to the work signal for new products thru the marketing noise. 

There were also some 'intermission pieces' where the various Microsoft Exec's did some lip-syncing to some old music hits, and well they were quite entertaining ... but guys, don't give up your day jobs :-)

SteveB had a segment that started off (and stayed) quite 'cool, calm and collected' where he 'sharing his thoughts' and 'bla, bla, bla bla bla'; for SteveB. I'm developing a math theory that the level of SteveB energy is directly proportional to the size of the audience and the opportunity to Microsoft'. Nothing seems too big for his energy and vision so 'keep those cash registers ringing'.

In wrapping up, a look at 10 years into the future, BillG and SteveB shared a little of their vision about software being a lot different than today where software has the potential to change the rules of the game, and as we invest in excellent software there's a direct relationship to an excellent future. Also in years to come we'll all have a clearer understanding and appreciation of the commercial software model; and there will be open source around too.

All in all it was a great meeting, as much as or even more 'energy' than say the Amazon.com company meetings I went to back in the 1990's which were also great, but it was good to hear that Microsoft knows it's important to work even more on being better 'citizens' and help create better technology for the world.