Summary and Transcript: First Windows Azure Lounge Chat

Last week we did an interesting experiment called the Windows Azure Lounge.  Overall, I think the chat was really interesting, and I believe people found it valuable.

Transcript

You can read the full transcript in text format or HTML.

Graphical Summary

There’s something mesmerizing about Wordle, so here’s a word-cloud representation of the chat transcript.  It seems we got what we wanted (direct feedback), because words like “want,” “need,” “like,” and “think” all showed up a lot in the transcript.

Survey Results

We asked everyone participating in the chat to fill out a brief survey about the benefits of and barriers to adopting Windows Azure.  The full results are available here:

• Question 1: What benefits are you trying to get from using Windows Azure?
• Question 2: What barriers do you see to realizing those benefits?

What We Discussed

Simon Munro wrote a great summary called “Windows Azure Chat Nuggets” which does a great job of summarizing the discussion.  Rather than create my own summary, I’ll just encourage you to go read his.

My Take-Aways

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this first Windows Azure Lounge chat, so I was pleasantly surprised by both the number of active participants and the positive feedback this chat received.  We’re very encouraged by the response to this first chat, so we’d like to do more of them.  We’ll be asking for your ideas about what topics you’d like to discuss and how we can improve the format to make the chats even more useful.  We’ve tentatively scheduled the next chat for August 21st.  Stay tuned to this blog and to my Twitter stream (@smarx) to see announcements of future chats.