[disclaimer: I am an Adobe employee and an Adobe and Apple shareholder, my opinions are my own and not those of my employer.] Like the rest of the software industry, I’ve been pondering what the effect section 3.3.1 of the iPhone 4.0 SDK will have. I had fully been planning to make an iPhone application [...]
Peter Wilson spoke at Ignite Seattle last night (How do I keep missing these?!?). Having been a senior dude at both Microsoft and Google, he has some true insider perspective on each. It is through the lens of what he cares about (cloud computing), it does have some good perspective. What is interesting to me [...]
Joel Spolsky wrote a love letter to program management on his blog. For the most part, it is a pretty reasoned and reasonable description of what a “good” program manager at Microsoft (and Fog Creek) is like. In my career at Microsoft, about 25% of the program managers fit that bill. The problem was that [...]
I saw this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about how Microsoft added another 11,200 employees this year and I was a bit dumbfounded. What are all those people doing? How could Microsoft expect to maintain quality hiring standards continuing to grow at that rate? Why on earth would someone want to join a company that [...]
When I first heard about Live Mesh, I was underwhelmed. I kept hearing that this was a game-changer, but I really didn’t see why. Today, I decided to figure out what the fuss was about, so I went to TechMeme to track down some of the better resources to start from. I read Ray Ozzie’s [...]
I find it hilarious to read some of the comments in news stories on technology companies, especially from folks who don’t write software for a living. A lot of the evil that people accuse Microsoft of is really incompetence, short sightedness, tunnel vision or good intentions misinterpreted. People hate Microsoft, so they choose to see [...]
Just got my first auto-reboot-update. I knew this was possible. A friend of mine worked on the team that decided to implement this at MSFT. However, this is the first time that MS decided that it knew what was right for me and rebooted my machine automatically. RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF AN AUTOMATION RUN, [...]
$6 Billion for aQuantive – a company I’ve never heard of with $442M in revenue. Umm… ok. Seems high. $500M for Danger, a competitor for Windows Mobile written in Java. $56M in revenue last year and has never turned a profit. Uh, who is doing MS’ accounting? $44.6 Billion for Yahoo! This isn’t a crazy [...]
Both Mini-MSFT and Joe Wilcox pointed this out. Microsoft isn’t replacing their high-level executives with internals. Bill Gates leaves, Ray Ozzie is hired to replace him. Jeff Raikes leaves, Stephen Elop replaces him. I’m not sure about some of the other executive departures yet, their replacements haven’t been announced as far as I can tell. [...]
Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing — RoughlyDrafted Magazine from a comment The recent WSJ electronics buying poll got even better after this article appeared. In one of the most extraordinary developments in the history of retailing the zune managed to zoom at the last minute from 0% to 24%. More than 144,000 enthusiastic Zune [...]
