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Today I attended the Business Leadership in the 21st Century conference hosted by Microsoft and the CBI. It was a grand affair located in the heart of London right next to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey in the QEII Conference Centre. Everyone was in suits, shirts and ties. No jeans or sneakers anywhere to be seen. The audience was a primarily middle-aged bunch of executives from the UK’s top companies. When I think about it what was I doing there? Well this was part of Microsoft’s big Vista / Office 2007 launch. Last week had been for the press and this one was for business!

Anyway I was invited by Microsoft specifically, maybe they value my opinion or something. The main auditorium was filled with many a round table each grouped by industry segment.

After a brief coffee at 9.25am (I got there a bit late) we were welcomed by Gordon Fraser, Managing Director of Microsoft UK. Gordon is fairly new into the role and seemed a little bit uncomfortable with public speaking but his intro was polite and well put. He handed over to the main keynote talk presented by Sir John Sunderland, President of the CBI and Chairman of Cadbury Schweppes. Having reached the lofty heights of business and receiving a knighthood I have absolute respect for this man but his speech was, frankly, a bit boring and delivered with all the enthusiasm that I show when asked to clean a dirty sink without Cilit Bang.

Sir John made some bold statements like “the UK is the greatest free trading nation the World has ever known” and “how does the UK compete?” well “through flexibility”. The whole conference centred around the ‘people ready’ enterprise - clearly driven by Microsoft’s current advertising campaigns. Office and Vista are seen as the tools which can help great people deliver great things for business. Sir John went on to say that it is “people that determine the success of UK plc.”

Gordon returned and the music that blasted out as he came back on stage woke us all up after Sir John’s ramblings about teams. Infact Gordon’s piece was almost as dull mentioning the ‘new world of work’ and how Office 2007 and Vista will provide the tools to…. hang on I’ve all ready said that haven’t I? Well it was said quite a lot throughout the day.

There was a break for coffee. I spoke to a lady from the M-institute about my experiences of using Microsoft SharePoint, Live Communication Server etc. She was quite interested but told me that most medium sized companies (typically those with a turnover of less than £200M) would settle for using Skype for transferring files between employees and/or partners. I shuddered a little when she told me this.

At last, I thought, someone who should have something to say. Jeff Raikes came on stage (a ‘real’ Microsoft person) President of the Microsoft Business Division. There’s something incredibly cool, charismatic and simply enthusiastic about most Americans who work in software. Jeff was no exception. HIs talk was very polished and even when he had trouble with the microphone he simply paused, re-adjusted and uttered “don’t panic you guys behind the scenes, I got it covered”.

Jeff talked about the next phase of the information revolution. He also made some bold statements. Microsoft anticipate that 100 million people will be using Windows Vista within one year. 200 million in two years. Roughly the same would be using Office 2007 (he quoted something in the region of 500 million using Office at present - probably all versions). He went on to say that the new world of work was based upon four key trends; one world of business, always on and always connected, the transparent organisation and cost pressure. These factors would determine the role of software within business.

Software would simplify how people work together (he mentioned presence information provided by Office Communicator and Groove for collaborating across boundaries); it would enable businesses to find information and improve business insight (here he mentioned pervasive search and using the Office suite as the front end for business process tasks); it would also help protect and manage content (MOSS 2007 mentioned here); and finally it would reduce IT costs and improve security. Fascinating stuff but not really any different from what was said about Windows XP and Office 2003 when they launched.

Darren Strange, who looks about 15 but is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, then came on stage to do a live demo of Vista and Office 2007. It was the same-old same-old as far as I was concerned having seen about 12 Office 2007 presentations to date. The Outlook 2007 to do bar featured heavily, Infopath forms within an email, live preview in Word and PowerPoint got some mutters from the crowd. There was a feature in Windows Vista that I hadn’t seen before within the Windows Mobility Centre called ‘presenter mode’ which turns of the screensaver and generally disabled annoying things that annoy when you’re presenting. He also showed Managed Folders in Exchange whereby emails can be dragged into a folder and immediately have a retention policy applied to it, say to delete the email in three months (important for Data Protection Act compliance).

Jeff retook the stage and clearly began to article the software and service vision that Microsoft has, rather than software as a service. This was a hard play into the use of desktop power and web flexibility. The Windows Vista sidebar had a good few outtings and quite a few of the customer case studies involved companies like EasyJet, Arsenal FC and FWBS ( a vendor of software for the legal profession) all making use of the new feature. Empire magazine demonstrated a film trailer browser built using Windows Presentation Foundation and looking very snazzy with mini, scalable video images (very poor quality in the demo though).

The came lunch. All I can remember was that the pudding was delicious. No, not THAT del.icio.us, the tasty chocolately tasty kind.

After lunch Liam Halligan (some correspondent bloke for a newspaper) hosted a customer session where a few middle-aged blokes sat on chairs and warbled on about what they’d done with Windows Vista and/or Office 2007. It was a bit uninspiring.

Cynthia Crossley, Director of UK Windows Client Business Group, then took the stage and tried to get us all enthused about Windows Vista. It was a clear “all this stuff that Google and Web 2.0 companies are doing is crap and you should use Vista and flashy sidebar things”. I kinda bought into it as I’m still a practical business user of IT and I like laptops and a full fat client please, with relish. Making sure your data synchronises as you move about and between machines was kind of overlooked though.

Then it was time for industry expert keynote. This was by Sir Ken Robinson, European Business Speaker of the Year (2006). Whatever Microsoft paid to get him to speak at this conference was not enough. The man is awesome. I immediately wrote in my notepad “the Eddit Izzard of business speakers”. Intelligent, witty, sometimes dry, sometimes cheeky always insightful. This guy has indutry knowledge and experience but can put it across in such a way where you laugh and fundamentally remember what he was going on about. He also goes off on tangents (a bit like Eddie Izzard) and expresses some very likeable mannerisms. One such line about the way that today’s youth are growing up surrounded and immersed in the digital age went “..and today’s 7 year olds will be retiring in about 2070. Just as they learn how to use Vista”. Funny? I nearly bought one.

Funnily enough the bulk of Sir Ken’s presentation was about creativity and what it actually is. He went on to say “and the creative types in your organisations are easy to spot. They’re the one’s in the jeans and always turn up late”. It was at this point that my boss and a coleague looked immediately at me. Not sure if that was a compliment or not.

There was another final panel involving Jeff Raikes, Gordon Fraser and some bloke from HP. It was quite forgettable though compared to Sir Ken. And that was about it. All in all some parts were interesting, industry case studies from companies you know are always insightful.

The gadget freak in me was thoroughly satisfied when Microsoft gave out a bag containing one of these incredible mice. Awesome.