I’ve been part of the team that organizes MIX since our inaugural MIX06 conference. I’m big fan of your /singularity concept and long-time subscriber to your blog.

We certainly don’t intend to deceive anyone about the nature of the event, and the “about” page is pretty explicit that this is hosted by Microsoft and is a peer conference to PCD and TechEd. In 4 years of running the conference, this is honestly the first time I’ve seen someone suggest that we were hiding or “ashamed” of being Microsoft.

On the other hand, this event has always had a lot of community participation and contribution. If you look at the sessions that have been announced so far, you can take the descriptions at face value. Molly and Nate are doing workshops on Web Standards, plain and simple — no Microsoft shilling, probably no MSFT-centric content at all, just fundamental education that people can use, whether they build on the Microsoft stack or not. Robby Ingebretsen, another workshop presenter, also presented at the conference, IIRC. Every year, we’ve had a high % of non-MSFT speakers, and we’ve had people from Amazon, Yahoo, EBay, AOL, MySpace, etc. give talks that included competitor technologies. We were the first MSFT-hosted event to dedicate 50+ sessions to “open space” where attendees could do their own sessions — we even recorded and uploaded those to the web within hours (and of course, every MIX conference has uploaded 100% of our sessions to the web for free, which allows people to follow from home.)

I’m not saying that MIX is like “An Event Apart”, but it’s not like Adobe MAX or Microsoft PDC, either. The high level of community participation isn’t due to us being “ashamed” of ourselves; it’s just being realistic about the fact that we’re not calling the shots on the web; we are just a participant. I guess the best way to get a flavor for it is to talk to people who have been there, or better yet attend or present yourself! We’ll be opening up submissions for presenters and presentation topics shortly (and my e-mail is joshuaa (at) msft if you want to reach me directly).

Note that we also run “MIX Online”, which is a sister to, but independent of the conference. That’s the site where we publish open-source projects we create to help push along adoption of web standards. Our first release was the Microformats Toolkit, which was released under a BSD-style license, and has already been extended to Google Chrome, Firefox, WordPress, etc. by the community. Again, pretty much 100% of the twitter/friendfeed and blog reaction to this was similar to Chris Messina’s reaction: http://twitter.com/factoryjoe/statuses/971184651 — that is, people seemed to be surprised that MSFT is doing these things, but not deceived about the fact that it *is* MSFT.

Cheers,
Joshua

See my note to Ryan above, however. I still feel that there is a very visible attempt to portray Mix, at least in the ads, as a general community conference for developers and designers — which it absolutely is not.

There’s something to be said about trying to make MIX appear to be a general conference for developers and designers, only to have all the topics cover Microsoft technologies.

As far as the ads go, I would go so far as to say that it falls into misrepresentation. At the very least, it hits me as a shady ethical practice.

I also agree with Scott on some (not all) of the points he makes on his blog post.

It is refreshing to see that MIX was not branded as MICROSOFT and kind of reminds me of when FITC change their name from Flash In The Can and had a few sessions about Processing.

This is a step in the right direction in my opinion…

http://blip.tv/file/319044/

it takes a generation for a brand to recover from a bad image, so it’s better to just use a different name – in this case MIX or .NET instead of Microsoft.

Typo, I put the (design) in the wrong spot, but the intent was Adobe detracted from it’s core base to be more “like” Microsoft. It’s something you yourself realised via my comments as well, so to be fair .. weak moment? :)

MIX is always regarded as a Microsoft conference and any google search will give you a clear picture of this. I think you’re putting too much effort into portraying something that isn’t there. I’ll talk with the branding owners of MIX to see if there is some valid reasons for this, but on a personal level – i’m kind of glad we didn’t push the Microsoft logo onto this one, as at times I would like us to let our own products/events etc stand on their own two feet in a sort of neutral zone.

As to promoting some seductive way to trick people into thinking it’s not Microsoft? hmmm… good fiction writing is hard to come by is my only rebuttle here :)

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

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Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
Microsoft.