Last month, Microsoft opened up registrations for its Build 2020 developer conference. As usual, the website just shows a brief agenda with highlights of what's going to happen. There's a keynote, although interestingly and for the first time, there doesn't appear to be a Vision Keynote with CEO Satya Nadella.
Instead, the keynote was set to include "Scott Guthrie along with other visionaries"; however, that's since been changed on the website. Now, it only says that "visionaries" will be on stage, removing Guthrie and all of his red Polo shirts. You can find the original wording here, thanks to the Internet Archive.
Guthrie is Microsoft's Executive Vice President of the Cloud and AI Group, a title that he's held since early 2014. He's also a member of the Senior Leadership Team at the firm, in charge of things like Azure, Visual Studio, GitHub, SQL Server, Power BI, and more.
We did reach out to Microsoft to ask why Guthrie was removed from the schedule. The company declined to comment, so it would seem that the change wasn't a mistake.
What makes this even more interesting is that for probably the first time, Microsoft doesn't have any specific name tied to the keynote at its premier developer conference. As mentioned earlier, there's no Vision Keynote with Satya Nadella, and there aren't any specific people that are running technical keynotes.
Naturally, this assumes that Build 2020 happens at all. Microsoft recently posted warnings on some of its event pages, such as Build, Ignite, and Inspire, warning that it's evaluating the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, so the show might end up being canceled entirely. Or, it could end up being a virtual conference.
Update: Apparently this was all a big mistake, and Scott Guthrie has been added back into the keynote.
Update 2: And he's gone again.
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