In The Mix

I’m at Microsoft’s Mix06 event today; If you’re here, be sure to catch up with us in Ballroom C at 3:00pm this afternoon for the session on Extending Your Experience. We’ll be showing off some cool stuff about Movable Type Enterprise, as well as demonstrating some of the lessons we’ve learned about making business software that people actually want to use.

It’s Bill Gates!

Right now, though, it’s Bill Gates’ keynote that’s got everyone’s rapt attention. It’s kind of surprising, since sadly it doesn’t seem like Justin Timberlake is joining Bill onstage this time. That disappointment aside, there’s some good news:Amidst the typical Microsoft-speak (if we all had a nickel for each time the word “rich” or “experience” was used, we’d be… Bill Gates) there’s actually some really interesting new things coming from Microsoft. All of us who’ve been frustrated in the past four or five years by Internet Explorer have a lot to look forward to, with improvements around both standards support as well as feeds. There’s tons more that Microsoft and everybody else will be showing off, that’ll no doubt be covered well on the Virtual Mix site.

Like peanut butter and chocolate

Overall, though, the most interesting thing about the Mix event is that it’s one of the few times that the world of developers and consultants who work primarily with Microsoft technologies like .NET and Visual Studio get to interact with folks who live in the LAMP/Dynamic scripting-heavy Web 2.0 world. Basically, Windows people don’t always hang out with web people in the real world, a lot of times. That means there’s a lot of good ideas that probably don’t get shared. Hopefully this is a good way to help fix that.

At Six Apart, we’ve got our feet pretty firmly planted in both camps, from the open source goodness of LiveJournal to the cool Windows Mobile stuff that our SplashBlog team works on. So it’s nice to be around a crowd that appreciates both. There will undoubtedly be lots of blogging about the event over the next few days, but so far, it’s a good start at doing a surprisingly different kind of conference for Microsoft.