klwilliams

Today was our annual company-wide meeting, and I was one of the chosen few from my group who got to go up to Redmond to attend in person. Seattle was cold and rainy, the stadium was colder, lunch was a cold sandwich in a box, and you know what? I had a great time.

We got to see demos of some of the new products coming out, including Vista, Office 2007, and Zume. (Ah, Zume. I wants, my precious.) You know those commercials with the Mac guy making fun of the PC guy? I don't think those commercials are going to be relevant pretty soon.

Vista, our new operating system, has incorporated photos/video/DVDs extremely well, with excellent resolution and some handy usability features I've never seen anywhere else. More interestingly, though, is the way search has been incorporated everywhere in the operating system (as well as how search.live.com has been improved and can be used with the new OS). Keep an eye out for Vista, as it is worth it.

I liked Office 2007 mostly because the Outlook improvements included a pane for keeping all of your tasks/to do's in one place, no matter where they came from (Tasks, email, etc.). There were some other improvements that were cool, too.

The Zume, though. We've outdone the iPod. Really, particularly with video, and with the ease of transferring music. The interface is simpler and gets you where you want to be faster, too. About my only complaint is that it only comes in black, white, and brown, though the brown is pretty. They'll be on sale around Thanksgiving, and I can get them for 10% off. :-)

Bill Gates was there, and we gave him a standing ovation for several minutes.

Even cooler was the presentation by the research team, which I can't tell you about except to say that some of the things you see in science fiction movies and TV shows we can do now.