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Here's my take on some of the sessions that showed up on Microsoft's PDC site as a preview of the content available. Keep in mind that this is representative content, meaning there will be more of this stuff when final PDC sessions are published, not less.
Cloud-Related Sessions:
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Microsoft is banking their future domination of the developer mindshare on cloud computing. Not just cloud computing, but cloud storage, cloud-based collaboration, and cloud-based application development, deployment, and just about everything else you can imagine. Live Mesh, the MOE SDK, and the Live Platform represent Microsoft's attempts at owning the cloud... they realize that they can't completely own the desktop, or completely own the back-end, and with the Google competition and the botched Yahoo! acquisition attempt, Microsoft knows that in order to keep moving forward and expanding, they need to do it in the cloud. Conquering the cloud is paramount for their continued success and innovation. Also keep in mind that MS intends for their cloud "stuff" to be cross-platform - anything that can handle RSS and XML should be able to handle the MOE (Mesh Operating Environment) and communicate with "the cloud". Make no mistake, however, this is Microsoft's cloud.
Here are the known cloud/mesh-related sessions at PDC. These make up the vast majority of the sessions published. I fully expect PDC '08 to be the "PDC of the cloud".
Windows 7 Sessions:
Here are the sessions they have published that deal with Windows 7. If you combine the Windows 7 sessions with the mesh/cloud sessions, you're looking at well over 90% of the known PDC sessions at this time.
So what does this mean? This means that at this same time next year, if all is going according to Microsoft's plans, the world will be changing again. The internet, in the grand vision, is a cloud-based service delivery mechanism that can be accessed programmatically as well as through a browser. Its a tad utopian, but there is a lot of merit in this idea, and people have been clamoring for years that the browser is an ancient and really bad way to get at the internet... Thinking of the internet as a ubiquitous cloud of services, applications, and data is the way of the future, like it or not.
I am curious to see how this whole cloud/mesh stuff turns out. It could go belly-up like Microsoft's last attempt at managed services that they tried through MSN, or it could catch on and become really, really influential.
