Phil Bradley's Blog

Thursday, October 07, 2004

 
Well, having woken up properly and shrugged off the jetlag I feel better able to comment on the event. I'm not going to summarise what we can talk about, since Liz Lawley has already done a splendid job of that. With regards the team itself, I was rather surprised that there weren't more folks with a library background (just Liz and I) and that was slightly disappointing. However, I guess that with a 30 person team Microsoft wanted to get a good spread of experience and interests.

I wasn't overly enthused at the end of Day One because, although we covered a lot of ground it seemed rather disjointed. However, it picked up the pace on Day Two, and I really began to get a sense of what Microsoft thinks its doing and where it wants to go. Lots of Microsoft folks around and they did a lot of listening and I spent a happy hour going over search concepts with a member of their team (to the extent that I completely forgot about lunch!)

My general impression was that Microsoft knows what it wants to achieve, and they've got some nifty ways of doing it. I don't think there are any doubts that we're in for an interesting time.
Phil 1:40 PM