Partner Day Thoughts

All the big announcements are Wednesday and I won't steal any of Steve Balmer's fun. I do have a few random tidbits from partner day though.

• Kirill emphasized that no products are going away. He said specifically that if anybody heard that he wanted to know. The problem is not what gets said, it's what gets done. SL again appears to be short on sessions this year. If I get time, I'd like to do a session breakdown like I did last year. It at least gives an idea of what's being emphasized.
• Kirill is a better motivational speaker than Satya Nadella was, and despite the accent, he's clearer than Doug Burgum.
• GP 11 won't be out until 2010, probably mid 2010. That's good news. There's a lot of functionality in 10 for people to explore and giving folks a couple of years on a good solid release will be good for GP. The last couple of releases have been so fast that they've left people breathless. Don't worry, there will be "feature packs", service packs and other items to keep the product fresh.
  
• Oddly, AX and NAV are getting "2009" identifiers in their next releases and GP and SL get numerical identifiers. No conspiracy theories here, I'm just wondering about the marketing thought behind that.
  Update: It was clarified on Wednesday that all the products are getting "year" designators but GP and SL won't have a year tacked on until they closer to release. So for now it's GP11 but the final name will be GP 2010 or 2011 depending on the release date.
  
• People were wandering around looking for place to plug in their laptops. That could be fun once everyone gets there!