The Age Of Coolness

It’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged, mostly due to a large number of projects I’ve been involved in. It sure feels good to be back . And if I factor in the context, it feels even better. Let me explain…

I’m watching the PDC keynote as I write this from the comfort of my office. It’s a pretty bold approach from Microsoft, I must admit. Having many thousands (perhaps even more since the figures are not published yet) of viewers watching a multi-track conference live via the web is something that has never been tried before at this scale. From what I can tell so far, it’s been working out just great. But this is not the main reason why I'm feeling good.

The real reason is what I see in front of my eyes. The code, right? you might ask yourself. Well …, it’s not the code. What I see is a company that has gone a long, long way from what it used to be 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a company that survived a fundamental change at the very top level. A company that “lost” its founder who was also its leader and one of the major figures in the industry (and still is). A company that many said will go down and will be lost in the shadow of the new “enfants terribles” of the industry. A company that was supposed to loose the race between its main cash-cows Windows / Office and Linux / Open Office. Or the one between its development platform and Java. Or the one between its SQL Server database engine and Oracle/MySQL/others. Or many, many other races. Yet, despite these predictions it survived and it did this quite well. The interesting part for me is that not only it survived but it turned into something that I never thought of … a COOL company.

I’m watching the new leader of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer as it talks to thousands of developers via a virtual PDC. What strikes me is that Steve has a main slide behind him which has three lines:

• IE9, HTML5
• Windows Phone 7
• Windows Azure

I’m not the kind of person that gets easily carried away and those of you who watched me speaking or delivering workshops and trainings know that it’s not really uncommon for me to criticize openly on Microsoft when I think there’s good reason for it. But right now, I just can’t help it … it’s for the first time I perceive Microsoft as being a cool company. I’ve had this feeling in the past about some of its products, but never about the company as a whole. Listening Microsoft talking about its present and future plans for the browser, the mobile platform and the cloud platform is fantastic. I’m realistic, and I admit that in two of the three (browser and mobile) Microsoft is currently a follower rather than a leader. Yet is shows good signs for strong comebacks in both areas. As for the third one, the cloud, Microsoft is shaping the game.

All in all, looks like this is going to be a great PDC. Not necessarily because it’s an online one (you can watch it here), but because of the content. We’re living very interesting times and it looks like Microsoft is on the track to be one of the major players in all three dimensions of these interesting times (browser, mobile, cloud). Even more than that, seems to me its on the track to achieve the one thing most of us thought it’s unachievable.

That one thing is being a cool company.