OrganizeFISH

A year ago, I was in New Orleans for the first time with Ed to attend Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference.  While next month I’ll begin my job at Microsoft testing a Microsoft product, this conference is about the non-Microsoft folks that generate approximately 90% of Microsoft’s income.  (That percentage is so high, I feel like I’m remembering it wrong.)

Partners include consulting firms from those that employee under fifty such as my summer employer in 2009, Aptera Software, to those that employee thousands such as Avanade as well as big name companies such as Best Buy and HP.  Other examples of partners are web hosts and ISVs.  ISV stands for independent software vendors and is just a fancy way of saying a company that develops software products, such as DyKnow, which was developed at DePauw by Dave Berque.

While Ed and I were brought in to represent the Imagine Cup, Mihai Nadas (Romania) and Darren Doyle (Ireland) came as Microsoft Student Partners to talk up Microsoft’s Students to Business program.  I had an absolute blast working with these guys covering the event and letting partners know they can help themselves by helping today’s students.

In fact, we made such a splash that this year there are sixteen students attending from fourteen different countries.  We’ve created a blog planet to aggregate our posts, and you can find our tweets with the hashtag #S2BWPC.

Tomorrow morning, we are starting bright and early with an 8 AM keynote that anyone can watch.  I am actually excited to sit in on these keynotes to see how things have changed from last year.  Now my sleeping schedule is clearly wacked as I’m a night owl with the summer off who has been sorting through my belongings in the midst of the night for the past week, so it’s time for me to sign off.

Wish me luck tomorrow.

Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Student Insider, S2B, S2BWPC, WPC, WPC10

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 3:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.