One less Microsoft event to cover this year

Microsoft’s Tim O’Brien, General Manager of Developer & Platform Evangelism, confirms what most Microsoft-watchers already suspected:

[W]e have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year. I know a number of folks were wondering about MIX, given the time of year, so we wanted to make sure there’s no ambiguity, and be very clear… there will be no MIX 2012.

O’Brien cites good reasons: developer confusion and "event fatigue" on the part of reporters, analysts, and tech bloggers. (Like me.)

"Sometime in the coming year" is a pretty broad timeframe. But there’s a big clue in the end of the post:

And something that was more behind the scenes but very relevant to the time management aspect relates to our engineering teams. If you’ve gone to a Microsoft developer event, you know that a non-trivial percentage of speakers and participants are from engineering. They take time out from shipping to prepare for and travel to these events and connect with developers, and their time is one of the most valuable resources we have in the company.

My takeaway from that is that the event—let’s call it BUILD 2012—will take place after Microsoft has released Windows 8 to manufacturing but before the product has gone on sale to the general public. If we assume release to manufacturing (RTM) in late summer (July/August) and general availability (GA) in late October, that puts this year’s developers conference on track to be exactly one year after last year’s event, in mid-September.

More details and speculation from my ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft to replace Mix with a new developer conference