I’ll be honest, dear reader: I usually hate the holy hell out of the Summit day 1 keynote.

As an example, check out the last keynote I liveblogged – go to the bottom and then read up. (Sorry, I won’t do that style again.) It was awful, one of the worst two hours of presentations I’ve had the misfortune of sitting through. (Sorry, presenters, but seriously, read that recap.)

This year, Microsoft’s taking a different approach, and my eyebrows are raised.

Joseph Sirosh (who was one of the presenters at that horrific 2014 keynote, but let’s roll with this and see what happens) blogged about what he’s going to cover in his keynote:

• Rohan Kumar will talk about how customers are using 2016
• He’ll demo machine learning at 1,000,000 predictions per second
• Customers like PROS, Intel, NextGames, Integral Analytics, and eSmart Connected Drones will talk about how they’re using 2016
• Julie Koesmarno will demo emotional sentiment analysis (please, God, let this not be yet another live Twitter demo with “big data” that’s actually less than 1GB)
• And finally, Jen Stirrup is doing a demo that Microsoft seems extremely hyped about

This all makes perfect sense – 2016 is a release year, but the release is already out. Microsoft can’t really announce much on Wednesday – it’s too early to go into depth on vNext, the majority of the crowd wouldn’t be interested in upcoming Azure SQL DB features, and let’s face it, SQL Server on Linux doesn’t demo well. (Nothing wrong with it, it’s just…a database on Linux. It doesn’t visualize well.)

So if you’re going to wow the crowd, you need to show them how real customers are doing real things with the brand new version. I like it.

But here’s the real reason I’m interested: it wasn’t written by Microsoft marketing. (Nothing against them – they’re smart people, but they just don’t build great keynotes.)

See you Wednesday at the keynote!