Inducted

I'm done with all of the presentations now, thank God, and long though the days were, I do have a slightly better picture of how all of Microsoft fits together, and the business paradigms they're using.

The whole company fits together mostly around a partner network, keeping headcount low, which means that each person in the UK has a lot of revenue they're responsible for. 2,000 full time employees in the UK, $2 billion profits this year, you do the maths.

The presentations from the Entertainment and Devices division were naturally really fun, along with all the cool gadgets they had. I was interested to hear the opinion that MS don't think the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war is massively important, as they expect on-demand download services to take the place of discs in not much time anyway. I also hadn't realised that it was Sony behind every failed format in the past, from Betamax and minidisk to the laughing stock that was (is?) UMD.

The stuff from MSTV, providing IPTV services (BT Vision in the UK) is just breathtaking, and when the UK infrastructure is capable of delivering high-speed broadband across the country, I can't see anyone who wouldn't take this up. A two-way, rich connection to TV services, linked into the entire home network, is certainly the way to the future.

I've got to say I don't envy those who stood up and gave the presentations to us, because at least half of most of the slots were taken up with Q&A, and there were some pretty tricky ones thrown in along with the more usual bits. I heard some very good ideas coming from the interns, especially some of the business lot. I was a bit cruel to the really nice, funky presenter from Online Services Group (aka, MSN and Live), asking her "What is Live search's selling point over Google - why should we switch?". She came up with a fairly good answer based around data trust after quite a few awkward seconds though, fair play to her.