Well, um, yeah, the keynote.... What can I say? Hrm. It was by Mike Morhaime who is a co-founder of Blizzard. And, I may be crazy here, but I would think that if you are a co-founder of Blizzard you would have SOME sort of public speaking skill. I guess I was wrong. Funny how that works. He read to us about the lessons learned (by his employees evidently) during the global launch of World of Warcraft.
However, I did walk away with two distinct impressions from the keynote:
1) He did not write the speech himself
2) It was most likely the first time he ever read the speech.
And I thought some of the talks at Tech Ed were bad. I suppose in hindsight, they weren't *that* bad. At least they were "power point" readings instead of "index card" readings.
And what's up with a computer guy not knowing about laptops? He was quite confused because when he closed the lid, the computer would go in to Stand By mode and the powerpoint slides would disappear. Well, yeah, what would you expect to happen?
I'm strongly hoping that it isn't a sign to how the rest of the talks are going to go. But judging by the names giving the talks, I have a good feeling that the talks will be reasonably high quality.