by There’s no point in keeping the polling open forever. We released the most recent issue of The NT Insider a week ago. In that issue, we asked the Windows Driver Development Community: Should Microsoft hold a conference for driver developers, and if so where would be the best location to hold it?
The response was awesome and the results were as we expected them to be:
- Almost 85% of the responding developers indicated that they were not as well informed as they’d like to be about recent development in the Windows driver space.
- 98% of the respondents had not been to a driver develop conference recently (that is, in the last several years, since WinHEC has been held in Greater China).
- 99% of the responding devs said that Microsoft should hold a driver developer conference — Almost three quarters of these would like the conference to ideally be separate from WinHEC.
- On the topic of their preferred location for the conference to be held, devs were more split. About 30% of the respondents voted to hold the conference in Western Europe and about 30% voted to hold the conference in the Seattle area specifically to be near Microsoft. Other popular options were Eastern USA (16%), and Western USA but not Seattle (14%).
- 88% of the devs answering indicated that they were either “fairly likely” or “very likely” to attend the conference if it were held in their preferred location.
Yeah!
Will Microsoft grant our wish? It’s hard to know. I have heard rumors (but no public confirmation) that there is likely to be a WinHEC at some points that will be held in a venue other than Greater China. I’ve asked my Microsoft contacts to comment, and I’ll update this post if I hear anything.
OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.