Live Blog: Gartner Symposium Preview

Every year Gartner, one of the Big Consulting Firms, runs the Gartner Symposium where they disgorge their predictions for the IT industry into the eager minds of Big End of Town clients with deep pockets. Imagine a crow feeding its young, but wearing a suit.

This year’s Sydney symposium is next week, but tonight Gartner consultants are previewing their Vision to a bunch of folks from the blogosphere.

I’ll be live blogging it right here from 6.30pm or shortly thereafter, depending on when the food and drinks get served. I won’t be live blogging anything, as it wasn’t that kind of event. However I did have good drinks and conversation with interesting people. More in due course.

No Stilgherrian Live, but some live blogs today

I won’t be doing Stilgherrian Live tonight. Instead, I’m covering two presentations via “live blogging”.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of some tin-pot outfit called Microsoft, is doing his Power to Developers presentation at 3.30pm Sydney time. It’s being promoted as a “Liberation Day” and a “live web rally”. Wankers.

Peel away the pseudo-revolutionary bullshit, though, and there’s something worth hearing about: “Microsoft’s vision around Cloud Computing for the software-plus-services world, followed by demo-packed sessions on the new technologies just announced at the Professional Developers Conference — including the much anticipated Azure Services Platform.”

Using “around” as an all-purpose preposition and failing to hyphenate “much-anticipated” confirms Microsoft’s illiteracy, and The Register‘s negative review of Azure has already poisoned my view. We’ll see.

Then tonight from 6.30pm consulting firm Gartner has “Gartner meets you in the blogosphere”. They’re previewing material to be presented at next week’s Gartner Symposium: “emerging trends and technologies… and what to expect in 2009”.

I’ll be live-blogging both events at special pages on this website. The links will be posted soon. Stand by.