It has taken me a month to blog about this because I'm a little embarrassed to say "I had lunch with Ray Ozzie" and be accused of being a name dropper. But what can I say? I did have lunch with him, and I imagine that since it was a lunch that bloggers were invited to, the expectation is that we would actually blog about it!

Prior to the MIX07 conference, Jeff Sandquist, owner of community content such as Channel9 and Channel10, sent an email inviting me to attend a small blogger lunch with Scott Guthrie. Scott is amazing in the way he makes himself available to the community and I was happy to accept. On the morning of the lunch, there was another email from Jeff saying that Ray Ozzie would be at the lunch as well.

This was interesting news, even though it didn't seem impact to make me return to my room to change out of that day's choice of "casual conference" geek-wear - jeans and a Mad River Glen t-shirt. So I chose to ignore the thought of my mother saying "What? You wore jeans and a t-shirt to have lunch with the head of Microsoft?" (Yes, at 45, this influence is still strong...just not strong enough to dissuade me.)

When I arrived at the luncheon I was surprised to learn that it truly was a small handful of people attending. From the .NET community, there were the familiar Scott Hanselman and Walt Ritscher. Lynda Weinman, of Lynda.com fame was also there. I loved meeting her (and she was dressed like a grown-up, by the way) Very cool, very smart lady. I sat next to Evan Williams who had a company name I didn't recognize and told me about his product called Twitter that I remembered hearing about or reading about somewhere. It took about another 10 minutes before I realized this was Evan from blogger.com (which he eventually sold to Google) and that Twitter was just becoming all the rage. (Boy did I feel out of the loop.)

In addition to Lynda, there were some other bloggers there who are equally well known in their non-Microsoft communities (a few who wrote about this lunch immediately! It's taken me a month to digest it - not the food, but the event itself.) So here are some interesting writeups from Richard McManus, and UX guy, Ryan Stewart. There were a few others as well.

One of the interesting things about the mix of people is that many of us were from completely different worlds. I know Scott H, ScottGu and Walt, but everyone else was new to me, as I was to them. I laugh at seeing Ryan's post about the lunch that readily identified the people I don't know and then "and some other people" (the bucket I fell into from his perspective). I truly wish we had had more time to hear from everyone at the table because I think the mix was very cool. (Well done, Jeff!)

While I know Scott Guthrie and familiar with his accessibility, Ray Ozzie was a little newer to me. I did meet him once briefly in a restaurant a few years ago (was it during PDC05 ?) when he and some folks he was having dinner with walked by and Robert Scoble, who I was with (along with a gaggle of others) grabbed him for an introduction. Boy, was Robert excited, he is always like a kid in a candy store!

At lunch, when we all went around for intros, Ray introduced himself just as Ray. I guess no further explanation was needed. :-) But I really liked that. It immediately said to me "hey, I'm just one of you guys." Even though I certainly don't profess to being able to envision strategies for entire software platforms of the future and how they will impact personal and professional technology use, I was a-okay with this! I can't imagine that I'd be able to as easily "hang out" with Bill Gates. While I admire him enormously and do hope to get a chance to meet him someday, I can't imagine I'd be able to relax if I was sitting at an intimate lunch with him.

While a good part of the hour long conversation ended up being technical (Scott Hanselman had a lot of questions about how Silverlight works) which was definitely interesting to me, but unfortunately way out of scope for most of the others, there were a few interesting things that I took away.

Richard asked Ray about the future of IE and would it become more than just a way to look at websites. While Ray wasn't able to elaborate too much on Microsoft's plans for the IE of the future, Richard wrote a thoughtful synopsis of Rays' response.

Ryan highlighted a question about the blurring of online and offline apps and how it relates to Apollo...a question which I didn't really understand because I am unfamiliar with Apollo. Apparently, he gathered from Ray & Scott's responses, that they are too. So check out Ryan's blog post for an informed perspective.

There was also a question of why Microsoft was engaging in dynamic languages, ala Ruby and Python. Scott Guthrie's answer made perfect sense to me...that it will make .NET technologies more accessible to a wider variety of developers and therefore can be used in more companies. Evan said that it will definitely enable his company to deploy technology with Silverlight even though his programmers are Ruby devs and probably won't ever touch .NET.

Nobody had to ask if Silverlight was really going to be the "Flash Killer" that many have called it(does anybody really say that with a grain of seriousness?) as that was asked of Scott and Ray during the keynote. The response to that question focused on giving people options - and for me that means as a developer, I don't have to learn yet another language if I want to do anything flash-like. I can just do it using .NET. Just like Evan's Ruby programmers can use what they want to code up Silverlight solutions.

The other thing that really stood out for me at the lunch was something that Ray said in passing, which unfortunately I did not have a chance to follow up on and ask him to delve further.... he said something to the affect that the client side of software is the most important thing to Microsoft.

This is interesting to me on a few levels (and still I'm frustrated that I couldn't get him to elaborate). As a developers of Microsoft technologies, I (and many others) have long joked that we are just here to help Microsoft sell server software.

Additionally it got me thinking a lot about how the definition of the client side has evolved to be much more than merely disconnected software that is installed on a computer - the increasingly blurred line between online and offline apps that I mentioned above. I have been thinking about it so much, that I am going to write about that in a separate blog post.