Microsoft revels in new Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio packages

CEO Steve Ballmer tossed the first handfuls of confetti Wednesday as Microsoft paraded out its newest version of Windows Server and celebrated its integration with SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft has been planning this Los Angeles party for seven months, so it had little new to introduce. The only real surprise was a 10-minute opening monologue from famed newsman Tom Brokaw in which he related inspirational tales of leadership and insight.

Ballmer then took the stage and spent his time pumping up how the trio of Microsoft products worked together to provide greater security, performance and reliability from development to deployment.

Tipping his hand to the tone for his keynote at an event Microsoft called "Heroes Happen Here," Ballmer said, "We use to have launch events where we told you something new, but now you come to a launch event to learn more about things that are maybe old friends of yours."

Certainly after five years of development, release delays and feature extractions, most notably virtualization capabilities, there was little new to say about Windows Server 2008. And given similar development tracks for Visual Studio 2008, which shipped in November, and SQL Server 2008, which won't ship until fall, there was little to single out as new. Ballmer spent his time, therefore, weaving a story that he said is rooted in "three of the most significant products in Microsoft's history."

"We talk today about our dynamic IT strategy," Ballmer said. "It focuses essentially on one thing, enabling the productivity and agility of software developers and IT professionals around the world."

Ballmer laid out four industry trends that Microsoft is addressing with its development tools platform and core enterprise software, which will become the foundation elements of the company's software-plus-services platform.

"The ultimate technology trend is to remove a lot of the work that happens inside the enterprise today in deployment and operations and allow that to be done centrally in the cloud," he said.

He then laid out the other three other trends: virtualization, interoperability, and rich user experiences.

The themes mirrored points Ballmer made last week when Microsoft began publishing APIs for its high-volume products such as the Windows client and server OS, Office 2007, and SQL Server 2008.

"The new products we are announcing today fit squarely in the sweet spot of taking advantage of technology trends and helping to solve what we think are the important customer opportunities," Ballmer said.

He then used a series of videos and demos to show off features of the three products.

He said Microsoft had been busy releasing products over the past 12 months and said the next 12 would also be busy with a high-performance version of Windows Server, a version of the server for the mid-market called Windows Essential Business Server, the next version of Small Business Server, and Version 2.0 of its Silverlight browser-based multimedia client.