Where does this shuttle lead to?

Hop on in ...

Who is located in this building, I wonder????

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Who else? Of course it's Mario, the man behind theSpoke in Microsoft.

Mark and I caught up with Mario after our Summit registration procedures. I was thinking since we were in Campus, I thought it would be great opportunity to to meet up and say G'day.

It was a really productive chat with Mario, we spent most of our time discussing about the issues surrounding the migration process and theSpoke 2.0, the future and vision of theSpoke. Mark and I really took this opportunity to share our honest feedback with Mario. Through our discussion we observed that, Mario and the dev team - guys like Rob Howard, Terry D, are very commited to fix the various issues experienced to this migration exercise. High on the lists of issues to be fixed include - restoring the "Blogs that I read" and making each page smaller (great for those guys on dial-up). So, if you got any issues and comments with theSpoke, drop Mario an email - mario@thespoke.net, he will fixed it for ya. No doubt about that! 

On a separate note, this morning (Sep 29) was the Senior Executive Keynotes address, notely Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin were there. Steve gave an arousing presentation, he had demostrated a tremendous passion and vision for Microsoft's future and also MS's determination and ability to combat  Google-Linux-Yahoo certainly kicked off the day on a high note. The following 12-18 months are going to be one of the most exciting period in Windows history. During this period we will see the releases of many softwares including Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, Microsoft CRM, and of course Windows Vista.

Jim's hands on demo of Windows Vista blew my socks off. I have seen quite a few demos of Vista but Jim's demo beats all the previous demos hands down. He shared with us the innovations behind the development of Vista and the enginnering principals applied is simplying amazing. I am so impressed by their determination to get Vista absolutely rock solid esp in stablity and security. IE7, another amazing software. I can go on and on but this entry has been pretty long but security is certainly always in their mind. After the end of Jim's presentation, I was truely sold and now I am so excited about the release of Vista and the advances it will make in our day to day computing experiences.

After the keynote addresses, Mark and I had the chance and honour to finally meet up with Yutie. What else can I say? theSpoke community is one of the best place to blog, there are so many talented and passionate people in our community. Yutie had blogged more about our meeting in his blog entry here.