Hi everyone!
I'm finally back from my old country where I spent 3 very busy days meeting people and compensating for time adjustment. At the MSN Event, I met with Dwergs (mess.be), Underdoc (msnfanatic), Tom (Neowin.net), Vitch (mess-france) and a couple of other guys from the French webmaster scene (like from Hardware.fr, a great site but you got to understand french). I also had the pleasure to meet with one of the most successful Messenger Plus! plugin developer, TheBlasphemer, as well as Apatik, the french lead translator.
I invite you to read the great article
posted by Tom on Neowin, it pretty much sums up what I have in mind regarding the event. By the way, I have to say that Tom was really a nice guy, and so was everyone I met in Paris in fact. The atmosphere was great, I didn't even had to show my "it's optional" t-shirt too much, especially made for the event (picture soon
). The guys from Microsoft France and their marketing team were genuinely interested in what we had to say. Messenger users in France are very lucky to have such a great marketing team, the people at
Heaven were professional, with up to date ideas about how to interest today's users and some of them were even pretty charming
(call me Arthur!). I never met the MSN Marketing people from Redmond but I do hope they are as dedicated to their work.
I'd also like to stop some rumours right away: Microsoft doesn't intend to buy Messenger Plus! and I don't intend to sell it. We met to discuss the future of both our softwares and also to start a tighter relationship, that's all. During the afternoon we saw many great Messenger 7 related stuff (can't talk about it so don't ask) and I realised that I got to stop being lazy, being selfish with my 7 hours of daily sleep and start working on new exciting features for my baby if I want to keep your attention in 2005
(I'll also post a new beta soon to correct the important bugs you found since last Wednesday).
I'll post one or two pictures soon, as soon as Dwergs will have sent me his ok (Tom, if you read this, mail me and I'll send you the pics directly). More information about the new version will probably be posted in a week or two on mess.be, msnfnatic and neowin; I'll keep on concentrating on Plus! 3.40, there's sooo much I wanna do. Meanwhile, prepare yourself for some exciting Messenger news!
Patchou