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January 21, 2006

Meet And Greet

The Microsoft Visio Conference was a smash success.

This was the first time in several years that Microsoft had thrown a Visio conference, and there was clearly a lot of pent-up demand on the part of the attendees. We had customers (folks who actually use Visio), partners (folks that build software that depends on Visio), the Microsoft product and marketing teams, and Microsoft salespeople from around the world. The language diversity was pretty amazing - Sweden, the Netherlands, UK, France, Japan, you name it. In fact, one of the presenters did his talk in Japanese, which meant we used a live translator. Everyone had one of those wireless earpieces that you see at the UN. Crazy.

The show centered on the new data features coming out in Visio 12, and what you can build with them (if you want a big discussion of those, check out Eric Rockey's blog). The audience "oooh"-d and "aaah"-d a lot, and a number of the demos got rounds of applause.

(That's a pretty good sign.)

For my part, I spent a lot of time talking with customers and partners to see what they're doing with Visio, and learning about their industries and problems. The sheer volume and variety of stuff I saw reminded me how incredibly valuable it is to get out of the office and into the field - there's a lot of innovation out there, and you oftentimes miss things if you depend on the Web to tell you everything.

So I'm pretty exhausted, but smiling. It's good to be home on a Saturday morning, you know?

Posted by Gavin Shearer at January 21, 2006 12:51 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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