The changing face of major tech conferences came in the form of a live-streamed speech on my computer screen Tuesday morning.
In it, Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella laid out his vision for “empowering every developer.” His 20-minute speech was followed by a series of live and prerecorded tutorials on coding, cloud computing, and other geeky topics from TV-like studios on the Microsoft campus, buttressed by slick graphics and pretaped videos, all day and night. And all of it was free, with easy access to 509…
