Microsoft Cancels Fall PDC Show

Published: May 30, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft has cancelled its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) event previously scheduled to take place this fall in Los Angeles, the company revealed on its Web site recently. The reasoning behind the move? Products it was planning on talking about will already be in customers hands, Microsoft says.

According to a posting on Microsoft's MSDN Web site, the company is in the process of "rescheduling" the PDC it had planned to hold in Los Angeles in October. As it turned out, the impending launch of several products was too close to PDC to keep its historical focus on forward-looking technologies, the company said.

"As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones," the company said. "By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed 'Katmai,' Visual Studio codenamed 'Orcas,' and Silverlight will already be in developers' hands and approaching launch, which is where we'll focus our developer engagement in the near term."

It seems a bit odd to cancel a popular show just because the products they had planned to talk about won't be "new" enough, even though they won't be actually available yet. And if not the new release of Windows Server, SQL Server, or Visual Studio, why couldn't Microsoft talk about the next generation of products, such as Windows Vista service pack 1 (SP1), or even what's cooking in the labs post Vista and Windows Server 2008?

Perhaps the real reason is the company wants to pare down its hectic show schedule to something more manageable. Or maybe it really doesn't have anything else to talk about.

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