artificial ignorance

I attended the Crunchies on Friday the 9th of January, 2009. The Crunchies is kinda like the Academy Awards for the technoverse. The event was hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Silicon Alley Insider. The atmosphere was surreal, it really did feel like everything I’ve seen on TV with other awards ceremonies. By now, you’ve probably read TechCrunch’s and VentureBeat’s coverage of the event and the winners. Our (Microsoft’s) very own Live Mesh won the award for the top Technology Innovation and Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect, and David Treadwell, VP of Live Services, attended the event and accepted the award from Steve Gillmor.

I was reading Dan Farber’s report from the event, and I found the following excerpt extremely interesting:

"The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft’s Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.

Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it’s a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform."

I found the bit about "perceptions slowly shifting" to be extremely welcome – as you know, this is something my team has been working on actively for the last few years. Our community is growing and is excited about what we’ve been working on with them, and I was delighted to see the likes of Dan Farber acknowledging this.

Here’s a video I qik’d of Ray Ozzie accepting the award at the event:

"ai"

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