It's been really interesting being down here in Redomond at the Executive Partner Summit (EPS) Americas - yesterday there was a lot of talk about roadmaps and the concept of "consumerization" which I wrote about yesterday - Microsoft Executive Partner Summit (EPS) of the Americas - Day 1.

Today, it was great hearing from both Brad Callahan (VP, North American Services) and Alison Watson (Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group) about the ongoing opportunity that "we" (Microsoft & imason) have together.  Nearly everyone I've spoken to hear (both at Microsoft and from other Microsoft partners) is talking about the challenging times, plan Bs, cost cutting, general anxiety, stalled deals, and a few are just plain out calling it a recession.

What's exciting though, and both Callahan and Watson pointed it out, is that it's a great time to be in "our" (Microsoft and imason) position.  From an imason perspective:

1. We've invested over the past 10 years in a superb partnership with Microsoft
2. Microsoft has the platform "in market" that really allows us to demonstrate to customers the opportunity to drive competitive advantage and cost reductions for customers. 
3. We have the solutions experience (both across Employee-facing and Customer-facing solutions) to "make it real" for our customers
4. We have a fantastic team of seasoned consultants.

In short, the times ahead will be tough, be we're well-positioned to take advantage of the turmoil.  I'm looking forward to tackling this one head on!

I'm down this Tuesday/Wednesday at EPS.  It's a pretty cool idea and one that Microsoft has been doing in other regions (Europe, Asia) for a while.  Basically, it's a couple hundred executives from Microsoft partners and a couple dozen of executives from Microsoft.  Over a day and a half, everyone talks about the future of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. Very cool!

One of the most interesting things for me today, was hearing both Simon Witts (Corporate Vice President, Enterprise & Partner Group) and Rich Reynolds (General Manager, Windows Commercial Marketing).  What was interesting was that they both talked about an idea that Reynolds called 'comsumerization'. 

Reynolds was talking from a Windows client perspective (i.e. Vista) about how, increasingly, users expect a seamless flow between their personal computing environment and the professional computing environment - between work and home.

Witts was talking about how Microsoft was the only company working across the 'broad canvas' - mobile, desktop, web, etc;  Witts elaborated on why support for the broad canvas was important:

1. There's a large partner & customer opportunity by breaking down silos (as an aside, partner & customer opportunity is understood to be a good opportunity for Microsoft).
2. Because every technology is flowing from the consumer market into the enterprise (basically from home into work)

This 'comsumerization' has been identified at imason for a while.  The notion that innovation is happening at the consumer level and flowing into the enterprise (or creating pressure on the enterprise) is a 180 degree reversal from the last 20 years of computing where innovation happened first in the Enterprise and then flowed into the consumer market.  I'm surprised this trend hasn't received more press.

This trend, or what we call at imason a Market Insight, is a significant driver behind our recent split into two Business Units - Employee-facing Solutions and Customer-facing Solutions.  We felt it was critically important that we stay in the market where we're building solutions for consumers (technically, we still build them for our clients, but the end-users are consumers).  This is where most of the the innovation is happening, and that's where we want to be!

Anyway,  back to the session.... Live demo of Windows 7 is going on now as I type!

The recent article in Macworld (Analysis: For Microsoft shops, Silverlight 2.0 trumps Flash) has generated quite a bit of interest over the past week in the Microsoft community.  If the comments at macworld.com are any indication, the article was not well-received by the Apple community. 

The salient question, for me, is 'Which is better?'  The answer is, it depends.

'Depends on what?' you ask.  It depends on a single question, and that is 'what type of solution are you after?  A solution that emphasizes experience or a solution that emphasizes function.'

When I say this, I understand the relationship between experience and function -> that is, if there's poor experience it will likely lead to poor function and vs versa. 

But to really understand why this line of distinction is important, you have to look beyond the direct comparison between Silverlight and Flash.  Here are the 5 important dimensions:

1. Microsoft vs Adobe
2. Microsoft platform vs Adobe platform
3. Microsoft community vs Adobe community
4. Microsoft tools (Expression Suite) vs Adobe tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, CS4)
5. Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flash

When you look at it across these dimensions, Microsoft has the edge in terms of function.  They have a very deep base for building functional solutions - it goes way beyond what's currently available in Silverlight.  Everything around Microsoft (history, platform, tools and community) is built around function.  And, everything around Adobe is built around experience.  It's so important to consider the role of the community here - Silverlight isn't necessarily better at functional solutions; but there's a huge base of experience (both at Microsoft and at the 600,000 or so Microsoft partners around the world) in building functional apps.  And, a similar story on the Adobe side with respect to experience-based solutions.

It's also interesting to note that Microsoft is edging closer towards experience (Silverlight and the Expression suite are evidence of this) and Adobe is edging closer to function (AIR, Flex are evidence of this).  This will be great for the industry.