The keynote was good, but it ran too long. I did expect a bit more excitement from Steve Ballmer than he showed. He didn’t do any shouting at this keynote. He went over some stuff about Windows Server and Windows Mobile and announced Windows Update for all Microsoft products instead of just a select few.

He hinted at a Release 2 of Windows Server 2003 that would include more features like built-in virtualization instead of a stand-alone Virtual Server product.

He demoed a web application called Virtual Earth that’s pretty much a copy of Google Maps except for a hybrid view that showed the satellite picture below a translucent map view. Windows Mobile also has some pretty cool features like remote wipe if the device is lost. The device can be wiped remotely.

Visual Studio Tools for Office looks really good. With it we can create a Windows Forms application that can be hosted inside an Office application. The most obvious of these is Outlook. WS Management will also be big for server administrators. It will allow management of servers besides Windows servers. They showed a demo using Sun servers. Steve then covered security vulnerabilities and showed a slide showing how many more vulnerabilities Suse and RedHat linux have than Windows Server 2003. Active Directory is the most popular directory, and the keynote was over. It took quite a while to get out of the keynote room because of the bottleneck at the exits.