…they’re holding the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4 today, Wednesday, September 12th, 2012.
That’s right: they’re holding it at about the same time as the iPhone 5 keynote scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4. There’s a fine line between chutzpah and masochism, and the folks at Redmond are downing a 40 of malt liquor and driving a Big Wheel all over it.
Microsoft announced the date for this event before Apple announced the date for theirs. Still, the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch is an online event (not counting the “studio audience”) and could’ve easily been moved. I suppose that Microsoft weighed their options and thought “either we move the event and tacitly admit that Apple is now controlling our schedule or we keep the date and hope that our audience cares more about developer tools than the new iPhone and iOS and prefer a live-streamed video of our launch over liveblogs of the Apple event”.
The silver lining in the double-booking is that the iPhone event is drawing away enough people to guarantee that the video feed of the Visual Studio launch’s streaming video is smooth as silk.