Keynote Bill Gates - Benelux Developer Conference 2005

Developer days Benelux opened today with the keynote by Bill Gates, not a lot of surprises however during his presentation, although some interesting points where made:

Rate of adoption of new technologies is faster in the consumer area and Microsoft sees a lot of opportunities in this area. Companies which are mentionned as direct competitors are Nokia, Sony, Google and Apple

He mentionned SharePoint a couple of times during his keynote, the product definitely seems to be a success story and has been rapidly deployed in lots of organisations worldwide.

With each new release of a development platform (win32,.Net 1.0, .Net 2.0), the base platform incorporates more fundamental building blocks which will allow developers to step in at a higher level of abstraction. We will see this trend evolve in the next 5 to 10 years.

Developers will need more awareness of formal development methodologies. The gap between the models which describe the software and the actual code will become less wide, this means that we will experience in the future a much easier flow throughout the different stages of a software project, from definition study to the eventual coding

Bill Gates also mentionned the new e-Id (An electronic identity card based on smartcard technology) that is being deployed here in Belgium (It seemed that the same day some more news about i was made available, check out Bill Gates wil Belgische eId integreren in zijn software (only in dutch)