Oh dear, Tech*Ed keynote #TEE09

As I type people are leaving the keynote in significant numbers. It seems rude, but I can understand.

Keynotes at Tech*Ed have declined in power as the suits take over. Back in the old days <bg> keynotes were fun, silly, energising, and had a lot of WOW. And the smartest thing worn was a relatively fresh golf shirt.

This feels like the conclusion of the past few years. The Microsoft speakers are in suits and ties for heaven's sake; and the whole thing has a serious business to business tone, rather than techie to techie.

It might change in the next 50 minutes but I'm not hopeful. When you think of the opportunity:
Exchange 2010
Office 2010
Sharepoint 2010
Sql Server 2008 R2
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Visual Studio 2010
Powershell 2
Project 2010
Forefront TMG 2010
That could have filled many hours of WOW demos.

Is it because Tech*Ed is in the early winter instead of the summer?

Ah, at last!!!!! Julia White is on after 45 minutes doing an exchange 2010 demo, but unfortunately a lot it's stuff that's been in the public domain for a while.
The biggest cheer was for the OWA demo using Firefox :-)

Now we've got 2008 r2 tools and eco being evangelised.

Overall I feel this keynote has been written by Redmond to sell to suits and to people watching on the web, not by techies to wow techies... Honestly - how many techies get excited by the bottom line?