Posted: Nov. 1, 2010
With PDC 2010 we were able to deliver an on-site event that was fantastic for those of us in Redmond, but more importantly, we were able to reach more developers around the world than ever before through PDC online. In addition to more than 30,000 developers at 250 PDC events worldwide, another 100,000 developers viewed the event online using Silverlight, with 10% of the online audience taking advantage of simultaneous translation into Japanese, Spanish, French and Chinese. This is incredible reach.
One theme at PDC was the opportunity in balancing the client and the cloud. The importance of the cloud remains paramount, and we also must focus on the richness of the ever smarter devices around us, and how to take advantage of both. This is a topic that everyone cares about – CIOs, CEOs and developers alike.
We’ve seen the emergence of a wide variety of Internet connected devices – and as I said last week, HTML 5 will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across these devices, and Microsoft will build the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows. At the PDC we showed the great progress we are making on this with IE 9. We will also enable browser scenarios that provide additional capabilities, including Silverlight. Silverlight provides the richest media streaming capabilities on the web, and we will continue to deliver that on both Windows and Mac.
Client applications are important to take maximum advantage of devices, and we will deliver rich platforms and frameworks that enable developers to best take advantage of them. We’ve sold more than 240 million copies of Windows 7 in the last 12 months – an absolutely phenomenal number. Developers can build great applications for it using Win32, .NET, Silverlight and HTML5.
At the PDC we also highlighted the great progress we have made with Windows Phone 7, which delivers a rich developer platform and integrated marketplace for applications. Developers can build Windows Phone applications using Silverlight and XNA, and we are excited about the application development momentum we have seen in the first two weeks of the Windows Phone 7 release.
Lastly, of course, we were able to provide a long list of enhancements that we are making to our Windows Azure platform. Nobody else has the depth of our vision for the cloud.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in PDC 2010, and I look forward to seeing you again, either live or virtually, at our next event.
– Steve
