I know it’s not much, but I was able to snap some pictures from the keynote at the ODC on the first morning.  All I had was my no-zoom no-flash iPhone camera (at a Microsoft conference no less), so they aren’t exactly great.  I figured I’d post them anyway just to liven up the content.  Plus it feels very Engadgety of me.

This was the room when we walked in…rotating slides with useless conference trivia.  There were only about five so we practically memorized them.  The most common name of attendees was Michael.  I was able to snap that second shot at just the right moment to get the “logo” slide.

Okay, okay, so I could have used a zoom function.  If I had a Windows Mobile cell phone, maybe its camera would have had that feature.  I guess I should have brought my Canon.  Anyway, you get what you get.  Bill came out and they let people use flash photography for two minutes before they had to stop.  See?  The iPhone came in handy.  I took these two shots well after those two minutes were up.

After some introductory words about the Office System Development platform, Bill showed a “retirement” video which seemed to be slightly different cuts of the version he showed at his CES keynote a few weeks ago.  It was pretty funny and had some great celebrity cameos.  Check out the version from CES on YouTube.

After this comedic break he continued on to talk about each of the three Office tiers: Client, Server, and Services.  I’m so focused on SharePoint that only the server piece really interested me very much.  He pushed workflow and BDC, which wasn’t much of surprise as those two things are some of the more powerful features of the product.  He also really touted Visual Studio 2008 for its ability to aide in Office development.  There were some demos of FedEx web services, the Office Live interface, and some apps that use the Office 2008 “ribbon”.  For the most part it was just interesting to hear Bill talk about the history and future of Office and the direction the company is taking it in, which is truly innovative.

Finally, Bill came out to answer questions.  While many of the questions were good, there was one guy who took a painful amount of time to ask a question that was basically just whining about turnaround times for SharePoint development service calls.  I guess if I had gotten to ask Bill a question I wouldn’t have wasted it with something like that.

Other questions included “what’s going on with Yahoo?”, “what do you think of open source?” and “how is MS going to make it easier to develop custom apps in SharePoint as opposed to just writing a full-scale ASP.NET application?”

The answer to the Yahoo question was interesting.  He pretty much said that it’s really all about scale, as in having a large enough chunk of the market to compete with the “single industry leader” (he never would say the word “Google”).  So it wasn’t so much about the technology that Yahoo brings to the table as much as the user base.

For the open source question, Bill was very diplomatic, talking about the tiered licensing approach and comparing SQL Server to the new MySQL in this regard.  Of course he’s really talking about “free” and not “open source”, but that’s not surprising that he would shift the answer more toward that direction.  He said that there is a legitimate place for free (note he didn’t really say “open source”) software, but as a business it only make sense in the tiered model that he talked about.  Essentially he just thinks it’s not a good idea to use any licenses that would prevent you from selling a version of the software in the future.

Anyway, the final question elicited an answer that was the neatest thing Bill said the whole time: in the next version of SharePoint, look for lists to be able to optionally correspond directly to SQL Server tables to make it easier to write more robust ASP.NET applications within SharePoint.  Even some people at Microsoft said this was music to their ears.