The last official day of Summit stars over at the Convention Center for breakfast, and no boxed breakfasts this time. Back to the general breakfast buffet, but it was much better than the two previous days. After breakfast, we headed into the keynote room for presentations and Q&A sessions with Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer.

I’ll be honest, keynote sessions like this are mostly lost on me. Sure, it was nice to learn Ray’s background and his ideas for future software development at Microsoft, but I likely won’t be interacting with him directly. And while Steve Ballmer is an energetic and engaging speaker, well, I was probably just tired at that point. Drinking from the mental fire hose all week can do that to you. The Q&A session with Steve could have been more interesting, but several questioners were pretty much blatantly trying to get photo ops with Steve by offering clothing and other items, and I just don’t react well to that kind of activity. I’m sure a lot of folks got a lot out of the two sessions, so I’d honestly have to say that they were well received, I just wasn’t the target audience for that.

MS provided one last lunch after the keynote, and I managed to avoid eating more salmon. Honestly, the salmon I had this week was really, really good, I just don’t eat much seafood, and I thought we were in danger of having competition for the Mexican Food inside joke.

I ended up bailing early from the lunch to head back to the hotel and deal with some client issues, so I didn’t sit in on the optional afternoon sessions. I did head over to the Sheraton where the sessions were held and had several hallway sessions with other folks, including Jasminder, Andy, Jason, Jeff, and a couple of MVP Leads, including Brian who had interviewed me for his podcast on Monday. At 6pm, Steve’s SBS User Group meeting kicked off in one of the rooms, and we had an interesting presentation from a vendor who’s putting together a new service offering for assisting partners with streamlining SBS installs. And after that meeting we headed to the Elephant & Castle for food, drinks, and fellowship. I had a long conversation with Ted and Dave, and got the opportunity to interact with several of the user group members.
Again, the steam ran out before 11, so I headed back to the hotel. I knew my roommate, Jim, had a really early flight (left at 6am) and would be getting up really early (3am) to get ready and head to the airport, so I didn’t want to get in too late. And that ended my last official day at Summit.

Labels: Summit2K8