3/9/2005

Session 50

First day, first session.  John Roskill – US Business and Marketing Officer, Microsoft Corporation. 

This was a fascinating presentation for me.  It was more on the business side and the statistics were amazing.  He had a trend for IT and books for the last 5 years the projections for the next year and it was very eye-opening.  He stated that Microsoft.com has over 100 million hits a week and reaches about 65% of IT people per month.

He metioned that Microsoft has done a developer tracking study over the last 10 years and found that 96% of all systems use a database.  Then he asked, “What do the other 4% do?”  An excellent reason, by the way, to take a look at the Data Access Block portion of the Enterprise Library from Microsoft Patterns and Practices.

Most interesting is that last Publishers Summit I remember quotes and numbers for SQL Server vs. Oracle.  I think the statement was made something like “You would be crazy to deploy anything other then MS Sql Server on a 4-way box.”  Referring to the price points and data from TCP.  Now that SQL server is 64 bit and will support .Net I think they are confident in this space.  In contrast, this year the focus was all on Linux.  According to Mr. Roskill, the single driving force in Microsoft driving satisfaction is Security.   The data he had shows that if trends continue in 2 years there will be only 2 server platforms - Windows and Linux.