From the Editor’s Desk: Running in Reverse (Premium)

This year has been … interesting. And while it may seem a little early for a retrospective, I'm calling it. I need the rest of 2023 to pass without any more change. It's just too much.

And it's not just change. Much of it is change that in many ways feels like a step backward, an unexpected return to something that was ... but had passed.

For example, I spent much of last week in Seattle, and the rest of it traveling to and from Seattle. I was there for Microsoft Ignite, the once-massive in-person industry conference that I've been attending for so long that it used to have a different name, TechEd. And the thing is, I shouldn't have been there.

Like so much else in this post-pandemic world, Ignite is different now. It used to be Microsoft's biggest annual show, by attendance, with 26,000 people visiting the hellhole that is Orlando for the 2019 rendition. But thanks to COVID-19, Microsoft canceled its expected return to New Orleans in 2020, a trip I was really looking forward to, and held "digital" (online) Ignite events that year and in 2021. In 2022, Ignite returned in a diminished state, at least from an in-person perspective, with about 2500 people attending the hybrid show in Seattle and a much bigger audience enjoying the keynotes and sessions virtually. This year was the same hybrid format, albeit with more people---about 4,500 attendees, I was told---and a longing hope, discussed incessantly by everyone I encountered, that next year, maybe, just maybe, things could return to normal.

But there is no such thing as normal anymore. And while I hope I'm wrong, I'm not sure we'll ever see a return to the Ignite of old. Seattle doesn't have the conference center or hotel infrastructure to support such a crowd, though to be fair, there are only a few cities in this country that do. And Microsoft isn't immune to the same financial realities that hit those of us on the outside during the pandemic: When you stop paying for something like work travel, you get used to not footing that bill. There seems to be little enthusiasm for flying and housing thousands of Microsoft employees for a week each year when most of them can just stay in Redmond, saving the company untold millions of dollars.

While there is much nostalgia for what my Windows Weekly co-host and friend Richard Campbell calls "the before times," I think there might be a happy middle ground between the heady days of liberal work travel and the stay-at-home nightmare of the pandemic era. And Microsoft may have already found it: I hear there are plans to add a series of smaller, focused, and regional shows, like how things were before Microsoft consolidated things into its three big tentpole shows, Build, Inspire, and Ignite: This would save Microsoft lots of money on travel and would bring live events to more people. What goes around comes around.

For me, this year's Ignite felt exactly like my three previous and much smaller work travel experiences this year, ea...