Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft is “postponing” the usually biennial 2007 Professional Developers Conference that had been scheduled for October:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

It’s not dead, it’s just pining for the fjords. It’s a little hard to believe that Microsoft has nothing to talk to developers about so the natural suspicion is that they merely don’t have anything they are willing to tell developers about, particularly in light of the notorious 2003 PDC which detailed a Longhorn client OS (now Vista) that was never realized. Too bad, and it will certainly require some extensive gyrations to schedule a PDC in future.

Next week at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference hosted by Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher there will be a special joint appearance by Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. While hardly a steel cage match, the conference format is completely interview based with Mossberg and Swisher doing the questioning. To that end, Swisher is requesting input on questions for the dynamic duo and baiting the crowd with some candid snaps of Bill and Steve from the past. In separate sessions, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer will also get the third degree.