Today I went to a Microsoft System Builder Round Table meeting.
It was excellent.
They gave me stuff, specifically a memory key with some neat beta tools, slides, and even some NDA stuff on it (they assumed I’m under NDA with them, but I’m pretty sure I’m not). Also they gave me two T-shirts, and some literature on some of their new licensing. They had give-aways of course, and I won a copy of windows XP pro, which I will probably never use, unless I give it to my dad to finally make his copy legal. I wanted to win the Exchange server Enterprise edition with a 25 seat license. That is valued at somewhere areound 3 grand I think. I was a little disappointed since I know we could use it at work.
I learned a bunch of new stuff about the OPK tools (or the windows PE cd) and I recieved a new tool called the OPX tool on the key which won’t be out until January 15th as a public beta. So that was cool.
All-in-all I have to say microsoft is no slouch in how they approach some of this stuff. And if there is one really great reason to not install Linux commercially, it is that I’m not aware of any tools to do massive deployments like Windows PE / OPK tools for Windows 2000 / XP / Vista.
The new OPK tools for windows Vista look impressive.
That is enough nerdery for now.