PDC Day 2 - A much better Keynote

The first genuine, spontaneous, unanimous round of applause after a Keynote demo happened today when they shown the Live Mesh stuff. Two 'friends' were looking at the same picture, one edited it, and it was immediately changed in the other one's machine.

Today's keynote was good. The highlights were Windows 7, Mesh, and Office 14.

Office 14 has a web counterpart written in Silverlight, that edits with full fidelity Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents. Google Apps and the rest of the online 'Office' tools will have a hard time competing with this.

Office 14 also has cool collaboration (two people can edit the same document and they get notified of the changes made by the other one), and web-publishing features (you can publish a chart in a webpage that has a live link to a Excel 'online' spreadsheet), but those things can be done with Google Apps too.

The 'Lap Around Azure' demo by Don Box and Chris Anderson was fun but they only feature that was not shown before was the Service Bus. The rest of the stuff ships with .NET 3.5SP1 or it was demoed in the previous day. I was expecting more Oslo content in the Keynote, but it looks that it's still to fuzzy for a Keynote.