Category: Uncategorized

I spoke with Jeff Sandquist (http://www.jeffsandquist.com/) last week on Channel 9 and some of the new features. Yesterday I saw that Channel 9 launched Clipster, which introduces personal video recorder for video blogs on Channel 9, allowing users to define the most interesting points of the videos uploaded to the site and compile their own videos. With it, you can then create a link to “watch this particular segment of a video.”  You’ll now see a red record button in the embedded video player on Channel 9. Very cool – a great way for viewers to create a set of favorite clips, each with their own unique URL.

Although I use this space as a look at customer and partner satisfaction, a quick “good luck” to Sara and her husband on their way to Waveland. I heard from several people at the office that her bake sale was a success. Here’s more info about her quest to Waveland and how to support their effort.

As noted, this is just the tip of the iceberg in the ways we’ve heard of employees, our customers and partners helping those in need. It’s refreshing to see the incredible support going to help the people in the affected areas: I hope that there is a similar outporing when the next earthquake hits Seattle.

Donation info: You can also designate donations to help those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at Americares (which has an astonishing 98.9% program efficiency, and disclosed that each $100 in cash contributions enabled AmeriCare to deliver more than $3,000 in emergency relief). And don’t forget the Red Cross.

If you haven’t found it yet, you should click over to Steven Sinofsky’s Techtalk – he’s a senior vice president at Microsoft in the Office group. (more info available here). Today in his posting on “Bureaucracy. Threat or menace?” he talks about a class teaching a case on the development of Office 2000 and the topic of bureaucracy, and the need to balance agility with planning and design… while keeping your external partners and customers customers satisfied.

There’s been a great deal of discussion on how agile and innovative Microsoft is vis-a-vis the perception and reports in the reports in the press that the company has become overly bureaucratic. What we see internally are how the improvements we’re making, which take time. As Carol Grojean pointed out, Jon DeVaan (who leads the Engineering Excellence effort) frequently references the article “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened” which addresses the reality every manager faces: dedicating additional effort to either work or improvement can increase the performance of any process. (As Carol wrote: “The issue at hand is do you go down the destructive work-harder loop, where you feel short-term gains despite long-term consequences, or do you follow the constructive work-smarter loop, where you feel short-term pain for long-term investment in capability?”) Jon has said many times that people should have the courage to change:

“Generally, most people know what the problem is and perhaps even how to fix it; the difficult part is just getting people to change. Everyone recognizes the problem and oftentimes it gets expressed over and over again in cynicism. The true insight is getting every level of management to understand that they are part of the problem when they continually reinforce the work-harder loop.”

Of interest may also be how we look at the evolution of how we develop software at the company, through the creation and use of the .NET Framework, and the effort to implement an agile yet highly disciplined approach to product development. . This paper discusses the nature and impact of these two dramatic shifts to the development practices at Microsoft.- this insight from our own Eric Brechner at the Int’l Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2005) earlier this year on the “Journey of Enlightenment & the Evolution of Development at Microsoft”. Eric is working on improving our software development practices across the product teams. The slides are an interesting read, ‘though alone it lacks the impactful delivery and depth Eric brings to his talks.

(Also a good read: Eric’s ACM paper “Things they would not teach me of in college: what Microsoft developers learn later”)

Today my youngest son stayed home from school with the same thing his father has… coming off a really bad cold. I had a string of meetings and discussions, some of which I participated through Office Live Meeting. I used the regular dial-in conference lines for one discussion (that was a problem) but the rest were all Live Meeting, able to view and sync with the presentations accompanying the talks. 

Last week Steve Ballmer talked to the Seattle Times with a focus on traffic and education, and said “what’s a high-tech company doing saying roads are a big deal — roads, roads, roads — tell everybody to stay home and work from home. You build this interactive technology; you should be able to stay home.”

With LM today, I was able to stay home so I didn’t sneeze around my coworkers (you’re welcome) and was able to keep some of the human interaction. I couldn’t look into people’s eyes today but I was able to get accomplished more than if I’d been stuck with just a POTS connection.

Kudos to the Live Meeting team for a great product that — as a Microsoft product customer — satisfied me when I needed it most: it worked without a problem. (Many times employees are among our harshest critics.) If I could get easier access to my Sharepoint projects… sync’ing latest versions of docs in the cloud… with people away from the office today, that would have solved some of the other issues today. For all the talk recently about hosted versions of productivity software, I was happy today to have the applications on my PC desktop when my cable net connection went down.