Hot-lanta

Apologies for my silence last week.....I was at the annual Microsoft internal conference which took place in Atlanta

This is my 3rd conference of this type and as cheesy as it sounds, I am still humbled to be in a room with over 12,000 peers and colleagues from around the world. Not to mention the passion, enthusiasm and drive of every single person that took tot he stage and spoke about the year ahead. And on that topic, I have never felt more confident that we have great things ahead of us. We saw some demos of things that are coming up in the next 12 months that blew us away and frustratingly we have ben sworn to secrecy including the next version of Office, some very exciting Software + Services offerings and the most mind-blowing, super amazing, pure genius future stuff that was presented by the head of Microsoft research.

There are 2 key things that struck with this week:

1) I work for a company that not only strives to create products that are industry-leading and answer the issues of businesses around us - the main example of this I remember was a healthcare product that connects all the disparate systems to enable the profession to make quicker, more-informed decisions

2) The power in this stuff is only truly understood when you see it in action. I and the team need to make a pledge to you that we will come up with new ways to help you see the products in action

p.s. the image I included of Atlanta was included for a reason. Every day after the conference, I walked through the Olympic park back to my hotel and experienced a different sense of being humbled. Each day in the 90+ heat, the water feature was filled with children and families playing. The enjoyment on their face was worth seeing every single day