Microsoft Ignite 2025 was held in San Francisco, CA on November 18th - 21st. My employer offered to pay for me to attend the conference. What I experienced was both not what I expected, yet entirely unsurprising.

This was my first Ignite conference. I'm sure much of what I'll cover here isn't novel or original, but I think it has taught me a lot about the direction of Microsoft and their products, I just don't think my takeaways are what Microsoft wanted me to leave with.

Event Logistics

This is less to do with the technical side, the talks, or the content of the conference, but I think it's valuable to share my experience in planning for the event, getting around, and the experience of attending.

The App

Something that I was not well prepared for was how important the app was to the experience, but in a very frustrating way.

The Microsoft Ignite app is, very transparently, just a wrapper for a web page. This app is clunky to use, frustrating, slow. It renders inconsistently sometimes, navigation is a nightmare, and the filters are unhelpful. Honestly, in retrospect, this app caused most of my frustration with the logistics of the event.

I cannot explain how many times one of my coworkers found an event they thought we should all go to, and the rest of us had to spend 10-15 minutes trying to find it in the list.

Getting Around

Coordinating an event with thousands of attendees is a nightmare, I have no doubt. We're all a bunch of mindless zombies that can't read directions, so I know getting people informed about where to be, when, and what to expect when you're there is a real challenge. What exemplifies this for me the most of the week was in getting to the keynote.

The morning of the keynote, we decided to show up at a reasonable time. In our brilliance, neither me nor my coworker had noticed the location of the keynote on the app. We showed up at the Moscone West building and realized we were in the wrong place. Nicely enough, the event planners did predict this and had a shuttle service with many contracted shuttles running. However, after boarding one, we quickly found that the realities of San Francisco traffic meant that it was faster to walk the ~2 miles to the Chase Center. We asked the driver of our shuttle to open the doors after we were at a standstill for 25 minutes in traffic.

As a result, I only got to watch around 45 minutes of the keynote. Oh well, my fault, I didn't read directions!

RSVP

The importance of the app was made greater by the need to RSVP for some sessions. All session that featured labs were RSVP, and some general talks, depending on seating for the session.

I'm not sure what limitations Microsoft put on RSVP, as I never ran into it. It seemed that the strategy most employed was to RSVP for every session possible, even if they were impossible to attend at the same time, just to have their spot. The result of this is that RSVP was, essentially, useless. The actual strategy was to show up to any even ~40 minutes early and enter the empty standby queue.

I wish I had known this earlier because there were some sessions I would have liked to attend but figured I couldn't get in since I failed to RSVP. When I did get into sessions though, this is where the real disillusionment happened.

The Sessions

As I started attending sessions, I started to get a feel for what the talks were like. I had already seen the summaries given for the events, but I don't know if I could have prepared for how many times I would hear the word "agentic."

AI, Agentic, Copilot

I challenge you, go look up the list of sessions from Ignite 2025. Count how many you can find that were not focused on AI. I counted less than 10.

I don't want to be dismissed as an AI hater. I get it, the direction of tech right now is generative AI. If you're not paying attention to the technology, you will be left behind. However, it's as though there was this elephant in the room that no one seemed to be talking about. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it felt as though there was a rule that every talk must include a tie-in to "agentic" AI and copilot. If the talk did not, it would be rejected.

I distinctly remember one talk I attended was around resiliency architecture in Azure.

At the beginning of this session, the speaker told the audience that their talk wouldn't have any AI. The audience laughed and clapped. The speaker looked almost nervous for a moment, as if they weren't supposed to say that. You could tell, so transparently, that everyone in attendance was sick of hearing about AI, over and over again.

Labs

Going into Ignite, I had heard from many people that the real value in sessions were the labs. "You gotta do the labs" or "the labs are really cool" was what I was hearing every year from people that went to Ignite. After my experience this year I can only believe that either the labs were different every year until this one, or none of these people actually went to the labs.

My experience with the labs at Ignite is staring at a loading screen, a broken network icon in a virtual machine, credentials that wouldn't work, or demo accounts that weren't licensed.

In one lab session I attended, I sat down at my station and logged in, beginning to follow the directions. Quickly I found that the virtual machine that I had gotten logged in to had a network error. Quite basically, it couldn't get an IP address. I raised my hand and a nice lady looked at it and gave me the equivalent of a shrug and a "try closing it and opening it again."

There were enough people in nearly every lab I managed to attend that could not complete the lab, that invariably the one leading the talk would just use the big screen to walk through the lab and describe it.

When the labs did work, what I experienced was a set of instructions that showed you how to go to a GitHub page, clone a repository, and run a script. Every. Single. Time. If there were labs at this event that were not simply running a pre-written script, I didn't see them.

After a while, my coworkers and I often ended up spending most of our time in The Hub

The Hub

The Hub was the vendor floor. This is where there were booths from many different companies all vying for one thing: to scan your badge.

The Transaction

Vendors always come to events with swag, right? Socks, key chains, fidget toys, stickers, anything you can think of. You wanted something? There was a price. It wasn't dollars and cents, it was to scan your badge.

I'll be honest, it wasn't an awful transaction in some cases. A nice espresso drink, or a good pair of socks? Might be worth the few emails I'll get or the cold calls that come from it. It was a little strange though, this underlying currency in the form of harvesting contact info. Is this supposed to be "networking"? This isn't building relationships, this isn't developing industry connections. It was clear that many of those running the vendor booths were given an instruction which was to gather as many contacts as they could to provide to their marketing team.

In this way, it felt so artificial. A gamified caricature of what an industry convention is supposed to be.

Conclusions and Takeaways

In the end, it was an enlightening experience attending Ignite 2025, just not in the way Microsoft wanted it to be. I will likely not attend another.

Microsoft is an AI Company

My primary takeaway from this event is this: Microsoft is an AI company first.

AI Foundry and Copilot are the products Microsoft is supporting. Everything else? You may as well not exist.

Azure? Secondary product.

Windows? I heard the name once or twice during the whole event.

This event made very clear to me that Microsoft is a single minded company of pure focus. With the shift to AI, Microsoft has signaled to the industry that every other product of theirs will receive, at most, "best effort" support. To put that another way, Microsoft's message to customers was clear: Invest in AI or become irrelevant.

Are customers really asking for this?

At least I got an $18 backpack out of it.