What if you threw a house party and nobody came? You’d feel pretty sad, I’m sure. OK, what if you threw a house party for 20 people except those 20 people told all their friends about the party and 45 people showed up causing your neighbors to call the cops and shut the party down and some of your original guests weren’t allowed to come back for an hour until after the cops had left?
Would some of those original 20 be a little pissed because they didn’t get in? Yeah, probably. But they would recognize that it was an epic party, one that would be talked about for months, maybe even years.
Well, that is exactly what happened yesterday when Microsoft held their official SQL 2012 launch event. It was a virtual affair, one that had been hyped for a while. The day before the event Microsoft released the SQL 2012 bits to the world as well. So by the time 11AM ET rolled around yesterday there were a lot of loyal SQL Server fans eager to join the event. Unfortunately many couldn’t join right away. Over 45,000 people descended on the site at exactly 11AM ET causing it fail.
In other words: Epic. Launch. Event.
If I am working for Microsoft marketing this morning I am running through a range of emotions. I would be frustrated that things didn’t work perfectly. I would be tired from having been up for over twenty-four hours. And I would be sitting there with a huge smile on my face and thinking OMG! 45,000 people! Whatever we did to attract that many people to a virtual launch event worked amazingly well! Let’s do that again, except have the website stay up next time! And make more hats.
If you didn’t watch events yesterday don’t worry, there is still time. The website will be available for the next 90 days or so. You still have time to watch the keynotes, or attend the sessions, or earn points to win an Xbox. And I will be dropping by periodically for the next 90 days to join the topic pods to help answer questions and just to chat.
So you didn’t miss anything yesterday. There is still time to soak up all the SQL 2012 launch goodness. And you can go download the SQL 2012 bits for yourself right now.
I “attended” both the virtual launch yesterday and the live Special Ops tour. I’d say that I was greatly disappointed with the virtual launch on a number of levels, but very pleased with the Special Ops tour.
First of all, having your launch website fail the way they did provides a huge credibility problem, since a part of what they are promoting is cloud computing precisely to be able to handle such circumstances… Not to mention I had gotten 5 employees, including the CIO into our largest conference room to watch the launch, and needless to say that was problematic.
But more importantly the content was less than stellar. #1 we were, rightly or wrongly, expecting at least SOME *live*, content. I honestly thought the keynote was going to be live…. Maybe I’m an idiot…
Secondly, the topic presentations were mostly not very polished and WAY TOO high level. For a 20-25 minute presentation I was expecting some meaningful demos. The PowerPivot demo was the best IMO, but ironically PowerPivot isn’t really a SQL 2012 feature, its a Excel 2010 feature…
The presentation on Hadoop was very disappointing. I was expecting 5-10 minutes of high level overview and 10-15 minutes of real demonstration. What we got was 20 minutes of high-level overview…
The Special Ops tour was great though, exactly what I was looking for and I was very impressed with the “Always On” functionality. Yeah, you can almost get to the same thing now with 2008, but the implementation in 2012 is so much nicer.
I’d give the Virtual Launch 2 out of 5 stars and the Special Ops presentation 4.5 out of 5.
That is great feedback that I will make certain gets passed along to the right people, thanks!
Thanks for the feedback. we’re in Australia don’t get the privilege of having a Special Ops Tour, so the virtual launch is beneficial for us. I hope SQL Saturday ANZ tour will bridge the gap between Virtual Launch and Special Ops Tour.
45 people is an epic party? Dude you need to get out more.
I suppose I just know the right 45 people.