Steve Ballmer live in Zurich

Daniel — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:49:21 +0000

Today I attended the “The global designer conference – Expression around the Clock” which takes place in 10 major cities worldwide (Auckland, Bangalore, Kairo, Mailand, Mexico City, Moskau, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Toronto) and luckily also in Zurich in the Swissotel. One can say that the event in Zurich was special compared to the other cities because the keynote speaker was Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

I didn’t know that Steve has swiss roots because his father actually hails from Biel and in the morning he got a honorary citizenship from Lausen

The keynote speech of Steve Ballmer started at 2:30 pm and was about 1 hour long. There was a live stream of the event available at the expression website and I hope there will be soon the recorded version of the speeches.

Steve focused on the user interface and the optimal combination of great design and great code. With the new technology “Silverlight”, Microsoft tries to combine the rich user experience of desktop applications with the broad accessibility of the internet. I like the comparison of the two “worlds” Internet vs. Desktop with the two words Reach vs. Rich. Unfortunately they go contrarily. The richer your application should be, the more you are dependent on local hardware and software installations and therefore you have a smaller reach.

After the keynote Sascha P. Corti and Stefano Mallè talked about “Next Generation Internet Website’s and Applications” and Sascha showed some Silverlight Demos in combination with Expression Blend. The key thing is that the design world and the developer world should work more together and Expression Blend is one tool which supports this in a great way.

Check out some amazing examples of Silverlight website’s (for a few examples you need the .net Framework 3.0 installed):

Steve Ballmer’s speaking style was very enthusiastic and entertaining and personally I think he was the best speaker this afternoon. The event was well organized by the internet-briefing club and I’m looking forward to the next interesting presentations.

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Steve Ballmer live in Zurich