I went to see Steve Balmer among others speak on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search at a special event for Small Business Specialists here in Denmark. Most of the speaches were quite weak on the search topic including Steve's and most of the audience was more there to see Steve than to care about Search. It seemed strange to me to invite Small Business Specialists to see Steve speak on Enterprise Search but there were about 500 people attending.
At the question period after Steve's speech (I honestly can't remember what he said), people began to ask all sorts of non-search related questions. The favourite topics were about mobile devices and Vista. At one point Steve asked how many people had NOT installed Vista on their own machines yet and over half of the people put up their hands. In response to this, Steve merely said 'wow'. After a moment of silence one of the guests blurted out 'There's the Wow Effect'. Somehow, I found that poetic.
Once again, Microsoft is making a good effort to market their initiatives with little understanding about how to do it. I'm sure Steve's time could have been better spent and it would have been even better if he actually said something about Search. Even their expert (Edward O'hara from Jupiter research) only talked about the Global Search Market trends. Mind you, his danish was quite impressive.