One of the cool things I have to do for my job, is to give demos about the latest products Microsoft releases. It’s definitely über-sweet to get to play around with all the cool toys just before or shortly after they’ve been thrown ‘out’ for the world to play with. The DPE group (Developer Platform Evangelism) I’m in has made it a key point to ‘bring back the art of demo’ this fiscal year, which means that you’re being challenged to make things happen on stage, to try and put a little bit of magic in every move you make.
Taking this by heart, I enrolled in the World Cup Demo Competition, an internal initiative to motivate employees to show off their knowledge of the products and a ‘dare’ towards their fellow employees to demo cool features. Very often, not everyone has the time to play around with all the tools we’ve released and not everyone has realized the full potential of our toys. That’s where demo people step in. We show you the goodies. Internally and externally. Me and my fellow Microsoftee Jurgen Van Duvel won the nationals, and we’re about to leave to Madrid for the Western European Division Finals. We’ll ‘fight’ the other teams, hoping we come out as the best.
The 3 judges are Alex Dale, OSG Marketing Director for EMEA, Roger Fontana, Windows EPG Lead for WE and Fernando Calvo Velilla, Windows Consumer Lead for WE. Pretty impressive people already. IF we win in Madrid, the next stop is the finals in Redmond :) Fingers crossed!
Agenda for the day:
8:45-9:00 am- Judges briefing
9:00-9:15 am- Welcome breakfast
9:15-9:30 am- Introductions
9:30-1:00 pm- 7 demos
1:00-1:15 pm- Winner announcement
1:15 pm- Interview & shooting session.
I’ll be caught up in meetings all day today, and tomorrow as well, with a small exception for the table-soccer tournament I’ve signed up for and for which I have to play the semi-finals :) Chances I’ll blog before Wednesday night are very small.
