Microsoft warrants little but jokes at a tech conference held in the company’s own backyard.

At a Seattle conference about technology trends in the Northwest, the region’s 800-pound gorrilla, Microsoft, was hardly in evidence. And when the name did come up, it was typically in disparaging tones.

Asked about Seattle as an environment for building a company, Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta complained about the absence of large companies from which to hire sales and marketing executives. What about Microsoft? “Well, you don’t want to hire anyone from them,” he said.

At a panel on acquisitions, SeaPoint Ventures General PartnerTom Huseby argued that Microsoft was shackled by a “not-invented-here” syndrome. “Every time you take an idea to them, they say they are already working on it,” Huseby said.

In a panel on mobile trends. Bobby Morrison, president of Verizon Wireless, Pacific Northwest Region, said Microsoft’s mobile platform was one of several competing for a distant third-place spot. The only good news: the Blackberry is also hurting, giving Microsoft a good shot at that third-place spot.

In a panel on gaming, Valve President Gabe Newell dismissed the notion of consoles like the XBox dominating the living room. Increasingly, he said, consumers will want to play the same game from multiple devices whether at home, on the road or at work.He suggested Apple would soon enter the space with a strong set of products.

Several panelists suggested the glory days of the console may be coming to an end as free online games gain in popularity. That, of course, raises the question of whether Microsoft’s multibillion investment in the Xbox came too late to offer rich dividends.

Well with Microsoft spending $9 billion on R&D to put its products on the cloud, surely the company would come up in a panel on the cloud. Well, sort off.

Brett Goodwin, vp of marketing at Skytap talked of going to a meeting at a big real estate agency about their cloud plans. In large letters on the overhead, it said DOS.

“Wow, that’s kind of retro,” thought Goodwin, thinking they were talking about Microsoft’s old operating system. No such luck. What the letters stood for was: ‘Don’t Own Stuff.’

When it comes to building products on the cloud, the panelists agreed, “it’s 95 percent open source.” If there was a single standard, panelists agreed, it was based on Amazon’s Web Services. There was a lot of talk about Facebook as the fastest growing platform and the mobile phone as the most common device for accessing the cloud.

Microsoft’s name came up only as a bottleneck to progress. “For 20 years we had enforced Wintel mediocrity,” said Peter Coffee, a vice president at Salesforce.com referring to the long Windows-Intel monopoly over the desktop. With the cloud, he pointed out, any new advance is quickly adopted.