Thursday, April 19, 2007

IT Pro Townhall Meeting in Redmond

This week I've had the opportunity to take part in an IT Pro Townhall meeting up here in Redmond, which gave me the opportunity to "voice my concerns" about the Vista copy protection problem to other IT pros and even a couple of Microsoft folks. We'll see what happens from it.

In any case, I've had a great time meeting a number of people: Jeff Hicks from scriptinganswers.com (Sapien), Jeffrey Snover (Windows PowerShell team), Darren Mar-Elia (gpoguy.com), Mark Minasi (minasi.com), Susan Bradley (sbsdiva.com), Mark Burnett (the LogParser book guy), and last (but not least) Karen Forster, editorial and strategy director for Windows IT Pro magazine (she's the one that recommended me to go to the event). Our last session of the day was a short sit-down with Steve Ballmer, and a few people were able to ask him some questions. It was an interesting and informative event.

Not surprisingly, licensing seemed to be a recurrent pain for us all. One participant made the suggestion that if Microsoft, internally, had to deal with their own licensing schemes that the rest of us are forced to put up with, the problem would go away...