PDC cancellation doesn't mean Windows Server will be delayed? We've had at least 2 PDCs during the Vista dev timeframe. Any Vista's lateness didn't have any impact on those PDCs.

I thin you'll find it's postponed not cancelled.

PDCs have slipped many times in the past, but those slips occurred "in private", before a PDC date had been publicly announced. To slip now, 5 months before the published date, right when the serious work of organizing a major event should be starting, is unprecedented for a PDC.

A fanboy interpretation is the PDC schedulers assumed WS2K8 etc would slip past their October date, but the software is coming in on schedule, before the PDC. That also would be unprecedented ;-)

Joe's position tends toward conspiracy theorist, that WS2K8 has run into big trouble, despite beta 3 being available and WS2K8 apparently being near the finish line. So instead of providing RTM bits at PDC as (possibly) planned, the PDC will be rescheduled to align with the slipped RTM date.

An interpretation reflecting (hypothetical) internal politics is that DPE, the group that organizes the PDC, wasn't properly aligned with the WS2K8 team's thinking, their schedule, etc, when they originally planned and announced this PDC. The recent reorganization moved Sanjay Parthasarathy (VP of DPE) to report to Bob Muglia; Bob now owns both the PDC and WS2K8, and he decides to fix that misalignment. That is, the mistake was made several months ago during PDC planning, and is only now being corrected.

If a new date is announced during the next few weeks, and it puts PDC in Q1 next year, I'll take that as a sign of a relatively benign snafu being corrected. If many weeks drag by without a new date, or the new date is in Q2 or later, I'll drift toward the conspiracy theory interpretation and assume something really major has gone wrong.

PDCs aren't usually synced with new product releases - those tend to be TechEds. PDCs are synced with new product announcements.

Given the huge number of announcements and beta releases we have seen recently (Vista, Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 1.1, SQL Server Katmai, Windows Server 2008, Office 2007, Visual Studio Orcas) - there doesn't seem to be a lot left to talk about.

From my point of view, I'm looking for a brief period where these products stabilize. I'll be ready to start thinking about the next wave this time next year.

I think my comment on the original story announcing PDC07 contains the real reason.

Joe, why are you comparing Leopard with Windows Server 2008? Like that is gonna have any impact on a Server product. I was speaking to a friend about it, and I suggested it could possibly be attributed to Leopard coming October and fear that it could suck all the air out of PDC. Look what the iPhone did at CES 2007. Anyway, isn't Server '08 gonna be launched at something called Dev Connections?

Still, Apple cannot do anything to affect Vista sales right now, it has been officially declared a success. Lets move on.

Other possibilities why it has been delayed, I assume PDC is really a starting point to begin releasing information about upcoming developer technologies that are probably not ready to be discussed just yet. I suspect they wanted to discuss Windows 7 and Office 14 but thought October would be too early, so decided to postpone it until a later date in 2008 which would be more appropriate time frame to start engaging developers about Vista and Office 2007's successors.

Andre, very good and likely accurate analysis - many devs, including all of our own, are very busy making use of what we already have - and just as many reset last year as more advanced techniques came online. I know that we reset most of our tools across the entire IDE and it took time for devs to catch up. Similarly, Vista is still very new and in many cases, SW is being completed for the new platform. It would be dilutive to hold the PDC now - we all have quite a lot on our plates as it is.

Yeah, remember, PDC means "Professional Developers Conference," with emphasis on the "Professional" part. PDC isn't held every year, and when it is held Microsoft announces major new programming platforms and functionality at it... stuff that probably won't be seen in production for around a year (sometimes more). If PDC is being called off for 2007, it's because we already know all of the stuff that's been released and that is going to be released for the next year or so. And there is quite a lot of new stuff that we have to work on now, that still hasn't been widely adopted: WPF, WCF, WF, VS Orcas, Expression, Silverlight, C++/CLI, LINQ, C# 3.0, etc. More than I can keep up with, really. All this means is that, for now, the major stuff is known and announced. It just makes me excited to know that there's some new major platform announcement (Windows Live?, and what that actually will mean, I suppose) to come at PDC 2008. I wonder what Ray Ozzie will be driving us towards by then...