[ Usual disclaimer applies. ]

It is indeed that time of the year again, when Microsoft'ies pile into SafeCo field to watch our CEO prance around like a monkey and run around until his armpit sweat saturates his shirt, and drink the kool-aid about how awesome our company is with all the "synergy" and "innovation" coming down the "pipeline" and how "super-excited" our executives are about our prospects for the year ahead.  Sorry, I guess I've been reading too much Mini.

So some brief thoughts:

- The video at the beginning was absolutely hilarious.  I'd love for that video to make its way onto YouTube (or SoapBox) soon.  (It was a cartoon-y video with photo cut-outs of the heads of the execs playing to some ra-ra song.)

- I was surprised by the lack of buzzwords used.  If it was a drinking game, I would barely have had a couple shots.  BillG was the only one that used "synergy" and even then, he used "synergistic" which isn't even a word (oh wait, maybe it is).  No one really used "super-excited" (perhaps on account that it was voted "People's Choice Most Overused Microspeak").

- The feedback loop that happened during BillG's speech hurt my eardrums.  Twice.  He handled it rather well.  "That was to wake up the guy that was sleeping."

- I was surprised LisaB and the HR dept didn't come out with anything new.  Mini led me astray after the BusinessWeek article.  Except for that wifi coach "Connector" bus at the very beginning.  Which doesn't help me anyhow.

- Demos were 'ok'.  Nothing to get super-excited about (in my opinion).  Much better than the Excel demo a year or two ago (where they showed that you could colour cells in 2007 :| ).  Can't wait to see what Zune v2 looks like.

- We hired 12,800 employees world wide in FY08.  Uhhh wow.  Do we *really* need that many people?  Core tech was less than half that.. but still.  8.3% attrition (4% is good).  Of all college hires, we get ~50%, Goog gets the other half.  Interesting stat.

- I did like ROzzie's speech and mini-history lesson.  He really pounded software+services.  It's almost becoming like a broken record.

- SteveB's going to be around for a long time.  Even though BillG's leaving this year.  Good or bad?

- It was refreshing to see execs cite specific competitors and acknowledge those to which we have not fared well against.  Especially impressive was SteveB's scorecard slide where he ranked red/green/yellow how we fared against each of Linux/Oracle/IBM/Sony/Nintendo/Google/Apple/piracy etc etc, customer satisfaction, revenue, innovation, hiring, etc.  I don't recall that ever happening before.  In meetings past I always felt the execs sidestepped issues of consumer perception and confidence.  Or maybe they always do that and I had just fallen asleep by that point.

- The only swag I got was a fleece for my team and a stress ball shaped like a hippo (yes, a hippo--guess why?) from the Experimentation Platform team.

Overall, a pretty good meeting to get some pulse out of this giant of a company.  What'd you think?