I, too, was one of the few people that got to see and hear Bill Gates speak on his vision of software at Athens Megaro (Athens Music Hall) this Monday. I didn’t have the time to blog about it right away though, as I had to complete my earlier, pretty lengthy, post on Entity Framework Caching.
That gave me the opportunity to read what other people (Panayotis, Nylon,…) had to say about it, before actually putting my thoughts on paper (well… actually web ;-)). So having read a lot of negative comments on BillG’s speech I can’t help myself from wondering what were they expecting? To me it was pretty obvious from the beginning that Bill came to Athens to close the deal with the Greek government and make some public relation visits. He didn’t come to announce a new product or even say something that haven’t been said before. So if you were expecting something like that, you came to the wrong event.
Of course this doesn’t mean that I’m being negative too. On the contrary I consider my self lucky that I got to see him one more time (first one was in Mix06) before retiring from his full day schedule at Microsoft and honored that he chose to visit Athens and participate in this event when he could have closed the deal over the phone. After all it’s not like he visited or talked to every country in the world, is it?
Well Greece isn”t just any country but one with the biggest adoption in MS products, especially in the public sector. Other than that I couldn”t agree more with your views regarding the speech. Besides Bill is a geek and as such you can”t expect him to give a superb presentation. Cheer leading is a privilege of Apple”s fans 😉