First of all, WOW. What an amazing amount of excitement and press/web coverage for Silverlight. I was absolutely exhausted last week from the press tour we did and the very interesting conversations we had with journalists, analysts, partners, and designer/developers that we met with… alas I felt greatly rewarded by the quantity and quality of discussion that was generated from all points of the industry, everything from general business coverage, the media industry, and the web development and design community. And we’re just getting started, as we have a lot more to talk about in just 2 weeks at our Mix event April 30^th.

Being here this week reminded me of how I felt 15 years ago at my first NAB, when Avid had just introduced the early Media Composer and digital video editing began its march to transform the industry. I feel like a similar wave is arriving, one in which Silverlight will play an important role in driving creative innovation, lowering costs, and improving scalability and performance of media applications on the web. What we think of as “interactive” media today, usually limited to DVD like navigation and not much else, is just the very earliest of creative concepts that will be imagined in the years to come.

Nothing is better for a software product guy/gal than hearing the oohs and ahhs of customers in response to cool demos that you have labored for months or years to create—and in our off-the-show-floor meeting rooms we’ve been having great conversations with leading media companies who keep bringing more of their peers back for repeat viewings of some of the early prototypes of partner content that will be launching in the weeks and months ahead. However the highlight of my day to day was something unexpected, completely non-technical or business related:

Over the course of about 90 minutes I ran into three former colleagues of mine, now all at Adobe, each working on different aspects of technology that either directly competes with projects that I work on, or have been mistakenly characterized by the press as doing so! In each case it was just great to see them—to hear how they were doing, to find out about the vacations they had taken to mexico, how their 5 year old was handling playdates with other children, how they had spent time off remodeling homes and flipping them in the market, and the usual “where is so and so working now” networking and search for lost colleagues…. Oh, and we talked about work too, and how excited we are about the industry, and the opportunities for us professionally within our teams, and the expected growth in our target market, what we have liked and disliked about our current employers, and about our crummy commutes and recent horrible work/life balance challenges given the amount of stuff we are working on, etc. And as we said goodbye we wished one another luck, and joked about seeing each other at the next web 2.0 conference (there seems to be one every 3 weeks in the US right now)… and indeed a couple of them I’ll follow-up with in a few weeks to suggest they might consider moving to seattle so we can work together more closely (just kidding)… anyways, this is the face of the “Microsoft-Adobe Death Match, NAB 2007” that the press talked about this week that I’ll remember most about this NAB—underneath the hyperbole and the troll running amuck on the blog comments, there’s just some cool people, doing cool stuff, passionate about their work, and a really exciting, wide open market that is emerging and going to change the world. Designers, developers, and consumers everywhere will benefit.  I’m really glad to be a part of it, and glad to have friends to share that joy and excitement with…