Microsoft certainly had a lot that it could have talked about at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Redmond this week - Windows 7, Windows Phone, Azure, IE9 and Office 365, just to name a few. This is why it took some people by surprise that Steve Ballmer used his keynote to focus on something a little different - HTML5.
With so many 'smart devices' on the consumer side of the equation and cloud platforms - namely Azure - on the other, the energetic CEO called the web standard the "glue" that binds them all together.
He explained that "it's a way of allowing and facilitating a level of independence and innovation between the back end and the front end," adding that HTML5 was the, "Lingua Franca for talking to all of these smart devices across the planet."
By 'smart devices' Ballmer was obviously talking about phones and tablets, but also included consoles, TVs - which he feels "are going to be very important" - and even PCs. In fact, Ballmer reiterated Microsoft's commitment to the PC, calling it the "no. 1 smart device on the planet today" and emphasising that it "kind of all starts with Windows".
The keynote also spent some time talking about Internet Explorer 9, but again, HTML5 was the priority. Ballmer told attendees that the focus for IE9 lay in two areas - doing HTML5 "really, really, really well" and improving the user experience for HTML5 in the knowledge that IE9 will be running on Windows. Corporate Vice President for IE Dean Hachamovitch was then invited to the stage, where he again stressed the importance of the web standard.
It was interesting to hear Microsoft use this forum to talk so highly about a third party technology, though it does appear to complement the company's overall strategy. It's also refreshing to see such a commitment to a freely accessible standard that almost all web users will soon have access to.
The keynote is available to watch in full on the PDC2010 website.
