Microsoft Norway arranges TechNet/MSDN Live a few times a year. It’s an event for the ITPro and MSDN crowds (with separate tracks for the two). It lasts a day, and it’s free of charge so it’s quite nice really.

For the keynote today they actually managed to get Steve Ballmer to show up. (He’s apparently on a European “tour” this week.) Now I’ve never experienced him live before, only seen the clips on Youtube of him running around like a madman on stage. Parodying himself he shouted “Developers! Developers! Developers!" to start it off

The keynote was about future trends for the next decade. Think “cloud computing”, “software as a service”, “access everywhere”, etc. I didn’t not now he was that fun to experience though and he made some funny jokes. I don’t know if this particular one was a new one, or a reuse, but it went like this:

“I said 2 years ago that Microsoft would not lose the Enterprise Search market. After about a year my guys told me that they had good news, and bad news.”
- Ok, give me the bad news first…
- Well, we’re losing shares of the Enterprise Search market…
- What! If that’s the bad news, I really want to know what the good news are!
- We’re not losing shares to Google.
- Then who are we losing to?
- A small Norwegian company called “Fast”.
- Then we’ll buy them!

And Microsoft did buy Fast earlier this year. I didn’t have any stocks in Fast so it makes no difference to me though

(Shot with my HTC Touch Pro – therefore the somewhat below top-notch quality.)