My CeBIT 2012 review

Yesterday I was with a colleague at Hannover (Germany), to visit the CeBIT fair of this year. We started there in the morning, looking around what is new and cool.

The first things we looked at where some German ministries, but that was not so interesting. Then we watched a keynote for IPv6 and security, but the speaker was way too boring to stay there longer than the 15 minutes we rested there. We were moving around, having a look what Google does (promoting G+ for pages and a coffee bar), had a look at some German web content provider, but there was nothing really exciting there. Finally, we arrived at hall 4, where Microsoft had its presence.

As you can see, the stand of Microsoft is big, in fact it is one of the biggest I have seen there.

So what did Microsoft present?

• Cloud Computing (Windows Azure, Microsoft CRM Online, Windows Intune and Office)
• Productivity and Collaboration with Office & Co. (Microsoft Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, Project, Office and Office 365)
• ERP and CRM Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics
• Data Management, Business Intelligence (BI), Integration (SQL Server 2012, BizTalk Server, Sharepoint Server, Silverlight and Visual Studio 2010)
• Client and Server (Windows Server, System Center, Small Business Server 2011, Forefront)
• and of course they did a preview of Windows 8

While presenting this things above, of course there was even more to discover:

Above you can see another view on a part of the Microsoft stand, where you were able to play around with some Ultrabooks and Windows 7. But that was not interesting for me, as I know Windows 7, and the Ultrabooks are nice to look at but more interesting was to get a view on a Windows 8 tablet. Microsoft used the Build Slates to demonstrate. Sadly you could get your hands on only after you made an appointment, and of course they did not have any appointment left before the afternoon/evening. So I decided to go to the Windows Phone part.

At the Windows Phone part, I had to wait a couple of minutes to get my hands on. First I could not believe what I saw there, but it was true: Nokia Lumia 900. Here are some hands-on shots:

The device has similar specs to the HTC Titan, it is only slightly smaller in screen size and has the equal good haptic of the Lumia 800. Paired with the fact that Nokia offers a bunch of very useful apps with its Windows Phones for free, I am really thinking about swapping my Titan into a Lumia 900. With this Nokia device it is really hard to stay on the Titan.

After playing around with the Lumia 900, we recognized that there is also an Xbox part. My colleague (who is originally an Apple fanboy) recently bought an Xbox and a Kinect, so he could not resist to play Fruit Ninja:

Microsoft also presented Dance Central 2 and another Kinect game – I will talk about this in another post.

As we finally could tear away from Microsoft´s stand, we were looking into the other halls. Dell, IBM, HP, nothing spectacular than already available products or talking about server racks and vending machines. After a short break it was time for me to turn to hall 8, where Microsoft did a CeBIT special about “Developing for Windows 8”.

My colleague was turning another bit around while I was there. He told me that he was at AVM´s stand, where he had a look to an LTE router, and visited an cellular carrier, where they were demonstrating LTE.

My conclusion: it was a bit disappointing for me as there was not so much interesting stuff as I hoped (especially from the hardware part), but my experience yesterday confirmed my thought that it is difficult to see something new, because all was presented already on MWC last week and not all vendors and companies are heading to CeBIT afterwards. Microsoft did an excellent job in my eyes by presenting some interesting information about their products, and the did also include developers. So for this part I can only say: all thumbs up!

Note: thanks to @dominiksichling for supporting me yesterday and let me use photo/video where he is shown for my blog post(s).