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John C wrote: how exactly are you fooling yourself into thinking the primary purpose is not marketing?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "marketing".
If it means, "helping developers understand how to use new Windows technologies so they can write programs that people will want to use so that they will need Windows", then I guess it's a marketing session. And they are very upfront about that.
But when I think of marketing sessions, I think of the three hours you have to spend listening to the condo developer's BS to get the free weekend in Orlando. It ain't like that.
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You (or your company) are paying good money, a *lot* of money when you factor in lost productivity, travel, lodging etc to go and be marketed to. If they want to tell us about a new product and get us interested in using it then tell everyone by posting it online and getting sites like this one involved rather than the continued arrogance of expecting people to pay to be marketed to.
I guess my perspective as a company owner is a little different than the perspective of an employee to whom none of this matters and they just want to go get their geek on at someone else's expense no matter the relevance or actual usefulness in real life.
Also I was never one of those guys who thought there was anything at all cool about buying clothes with corporate brands on them either so I guess I'm just weird. 
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it."
-Sam Levenson
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I guess we'll have to just agree to see it differently.
We find the PDCs to be extremely helpful from a technological point of view. We learn new stuff. We make contacts with MS people to whom we can go directly with our questions and not have to rely exclusively on newsgroups, MS support, and such. We find out what other people are doing and get good ideas. In sum, we're better at our jobs after the PDCs than we were before.
We just don't see it as marketing beyond the very limited sense that I mentioned.
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OK, that's your opinion, and you're certainly welcome to have it.
You do seem, however, to be under the impression that it was all about Azure, and that is emphatically not the case. Of the 200+ sessions, only 30 or so were Azure-related--about 15%. There were a lot of Win7 sessions, as well as numerous sessions on parallel/multicore computing, .Net and WPF, ASP.Net, Visual Studio, and on and on and on.
As for Azure, it's just another option. Nobody's being forced into it. You use it for products where it makes sense. For products where it doesn't make sense, you use desktop Windows or Server.
And I can assure you that I haven't been brainwashed. It's just that I've been there, and I know how valuable it is.
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No you are not alone in this Label oriented world.....
I am one that is of your ilk...... I dont like to spend (waste) money unecessarily.... especially if you have shareholders to look after...
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John C wrote: those of us who have to work for a living and can't go flitting off to PDC or other insanely wasteful marketing oriented brainwashing sessions / shmoozefests of their ilk
It's a whole different story when your company foots the bill. 
John C wrote: It means *nothing* to me right now at all and to many others I'm sure.
As usual, the MS marketing around Azure seems to indicate that they invented "the cloud" and Azure is a revolutionary service. This is far from the truth. From what I can tell, "the cloud" is just another name for consolidated infrastructure. Basically, one company manages a whole bunch of servers, so that small-to-medium sized businesses don't have to. You pay that company for the service of keeping those servers alive and kicking. I think this can be a very good thing for small companies that don't have enough money/employees to buy and maintain the expensive IT infrastructure required for their Web sites to go live.
There are, and have been, companies that provide exactly this service for years. There's nothing new under the sun.
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Josh Smith wrote: It's a whole different story when your company foots the bill.
Well that would still be me and in any case the more pdc's your company pays for, the more programmers they will have to get rid of when the economy turns south.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it."
-Sam Levenson
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John C wrote: Azure is in pre-beta apparently
But it's not the first player in the game. You can sign up for Amazon's right now (second gen in fact; EC2) and people have been using it for quite some time. There's nothing future about it. It's just MS is behind the times as usual.
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I would suggest if any of you have any reservations or want further info on 'Clouds' I suggest a look at this link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/25/cloud_dziuba
Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty
How Google and Amazon will take your money and step on your dreams.
I was intitially apprehensive on the safety of this 'Cloud' structure,
after reading some of the Blogs on this site .. I am now suicidle..
Whether these are Fact or fiction...is not the case.....
'Clouds' are Totally Unsafe in all aspects....
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DRew Hinge wrote: Whether these are Fact or fiction...is not the case.....
Well, it is sorta important to make that distinction.
The Register is the supermarket tabloid of computer journalism. I don't think they've claimed yet that Gates's parents are aliens, but it can't be far off.
Privacy, security, performance, and data safety are all serious and legitimate concerns that Microsoft must carefully address. But it is way too early to get hysterical about it.
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...but, no dice rain. Clouds are notoriously unpredictable...
---- You're right.
These facts that you've laid out totally contradict the wild ramblings that I pulled off the back of cornflakes packets .
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Wow, so many people not targeting the cloud?
That really rains on my parade. 
// mbghtri ToDo:
// Put Signature Here
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