PDC day one keynote - meh
first impressions after opening keynote for PDC2008: meh.
yeah, the new "cloud OS" is a compelling idea. and Ray Ozzie did a very good job presenting the material. but, to be honest, the material itself was not very interesting. no killer apps. not amazing displays of computing prowess. i know it's tought to make a killer presentation of a virtual service. but it's not impossible. and they tried, too. a hello, PDC cloud app written in VS2008 and posted to the cloud - some hand-waving, but that's cool. a third-party social app that uses the platform. very silverlight, kindy cutsie. but again, no flashy stuff. it's just there. then there's the talk showing integratonw w/ MSLive services. nice talk - no fun.
finally, it sure looks to me like this cloud OS ("Azure", really?) is not quite ready for prime time. this could be a real bummer. from what i saw today, this stuff is months away from being useful; a year or more away from being powerful. time will tell.