Windows Phone Thoughts: Leavin' On a Jet Plane - Five Days and I'll be Back Again

This afternoon I'm leaving for the 2003 Microsoft MVP Conference. I'll be gone until Friday night, and I'm not sure what kind of connectivity I'll have down there. Even if I have a connection in my hotel room, I'll be in meetings all day and won't be able to post news. And it just so happens that 80% of the news team is going to be with me - Andy, Marlof, Ed and Brad are all Mobile Devices MVPs. That leaves the new guy, Janak. :lol:

Because it's a little daunting running this site all by oneself, I've temporarily promoted our community moderator, Steven Cedrone, to the news team - you'll be seeing his name on the front page for the next week. You may see a decrease in the amount of news, or you may not - we'll see how well these guys do on their own. :wink:

I'm looking forward to the MVP Summit for a few reasons:

• It's always great to see members of the Thoughts team
  
• I haven't seen some of my fellow MVPs in almost a year
  
• Two words: US stores (big selection)
  
• There have been some new additions to the MVP team that include Smartphone MVPs and embedded Windows CE MVPs, whom I haven't met yet
  
• Bill Gates and Steve Balmer will be doing keynote speeches, and last time we saw this hilarious video where Steve was Luke Skywalker and Bill was Harry Potter :lol: (I kid you not!)
  
• Seattle & Redmond are beautiful cities - I always love visiting
  
• Three words: Microsoft company store
  
• And the best reason for going: we have a day and a half of meetings with the Mobile Devices team - nearly every program manager there is, including some of the important people who make the decisions - including the ActiveSync team and the product planners for the next generation OS. This is our chance to interface with them, bring forward the issues we've seen over the past year, and beg them to fix them

So there you have it! I won't be very responsive to email or private messages over the next week, so don't get hyper if I don't respond to you right away. :wink: Continue to send in your news to the news@ alias or use the news submit form.