Dean Hachamovitch to keynote at MIX08

Dean Hachamovitch
Dean Hachamovitch. Photo credit Laughing Squid.

During December of 2007, Microsoft had a conversation with several bloggers reassuring them there will be disclosure of Internet Explorer 8 at MIX08. At the time, the MIX website did not contain any hints to where that disclosure might occur.

With only a handful of weeks to go, the MIX08 agenda was silently updated sometime in the past week to confirm Dean Hachamovitch as an opening keynote speaker. His presence at MIX could very well be the first public demonstration of IE8.

For those who doubt my sleuthing skills, here’s a Google Cache copy of the agenda page from January 28 without Dean.

Dean of course is the General Manager for the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft with a conspicuously difficult to pronounce last name. You might remember him from such memorable blog posts as “please don’t mistake silence for inaction” and “Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone“. Some speculate he was pressured to speak out about IE8 only after Bill Gates had said “he’ll look into (the silence over IE8)”. You can also see more of Dean and his legs on his Channel9 interview with Robert Scoble.

At the time of writing, the speakers biography page has yet to be updated with Dean’s profile so “schedule subject to change” definitely rings true. A sessions search with the keywords “Internet Explorer” still yields zero results. Hopefully they can finalize the session details sooner than later and we’ll see a much bigger presence of Internet Explorer at MIX.

Update: Four days later, the news reaches Microsoft. πŸ˜›

4 insightful thoughts

  1. Long

    Scott Guthrie’s blog pretty much confirmed the inclusion of IE8 at MIX last week.

    “The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology. Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering:

    IE 8
    IIS 7.0
    ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
    VS 2008 and Expression Studio
    WPF
    Silverlight 2
    And much more…. ”

    http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/31/mix08.aspx

    sc

  2. Yep, it wasn’t a matter of if but how much – where it might have been just a session or something like that. Now we know Dean’s going to do a keynote on it, it’ll have a much bigger presence and of course it also means they’ll have to demo it, or it would be one weak keynote.

  3. That was/is such a trumped up and ridiculous complaint about IE8 disclosures. I couldn’t believe some of the comments people were making in reference to this issue.

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