LOS ANGELES (BetaNews) - It's apparent even from before the get-go that the theme of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference is winning back the marketing momentum, and bringing back developers' enthusiasm in Windows as a brand. Certainly many of them are already enthusiastic about the technologies they work with -- ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, C#, LINQ, the new dynamic languages like F#. But in the last round, that enthusiasm didn't translate into Vista, the consumer brand.

In other words, regardless of where developers have stood with Windows technologies -- and for many of them, it's not all that bad a place -- it's in a different world from the broad base of users who find Vista, with its frequent prompts for user consent and its infrequent compatibility with device drivers, generally irritating. Relatively few actually take the Apple ads' suggestion and cross the divide into the Mac realm, but quite a few of them share their sentiment and agree with their message, and that is a serious political problem for Microsoft.

If you're a political candidate, even if you're aligned with the majority in power, if you're several points down in the polls, you won't get far ahead by continuing to align yourself with the policies of the past. So the message of this year's PDC is, "Change is coming."

At the Sunday afternoon "pre-conference," during early registration and outside Microsoft's all-day educational seminars, the buzz in the hallways among the first to arrive is something that can basically be called the "Mary Jo Theory." Based on a hunch relating to a notice to hardware developers a few weeks ago urging them to attend next week's WinHEC conference here in Los Angeles, stating it would be the last one before Windows 7 is released, ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley has advanced the theory that the final Windows 7 could be released to manufacturing during the first half of 2009, rather than the second half as most believe, or the first half of 2010 as some manufacturers have speculated.

eWeek