Now in Seattle
After 8+ years at Microsoft, we are finally at Corporate Headquarters (eg. The Mothership). Interestingly, we have moved here to do the same jobs. It's been a productive 4 weeks, but admittedly, the first two weeks were very dreary because of the rain. After living in Charlotte the last 8 years, and Tucson for 3 years before that I've been quite used to sunny weather. I'll need to somehow channel my inner Filipino to get used to rainy weather once again. As you might know, the Philippines is a tropical country, near the equator, with only two seasons, rainy and sunny.
We've already made an offer on a house after getting through our initial sticker shock. It's almost 4 times more expensive than our old house in Charlotte and the check we will need to make will have one too many zeroes for my comfort. The house is on the Sammamish plateau east of Seattle, about fifteen minutes from Redmond which helps with all the campus meetings I've had and will continue to participate in.
In terms of meetings, I've already met with feature PMs, managers, marketing, directors, GMs, dev leads, test leads, etc. Groups include the midmarket solutions/partners, communications sector/hosting, SMS&P, D&PE, XBox, IW, Vista-Client, etc. So, I'm staying true to my intention of reaching out across groups to coordinate technical services and support opportunities for ISVs. It's also useful for me and our team to stay current on marketing campaigns, legal/licensing developments, evangelism rhythms, and go-to-markets targeted for the ISV audience. When we engage with ISV's, we like to paint as much of a bigger-picture perspective as possible (with information available).
Adrian, our 2.6 year old, is here and wants to type:
gg asqqqqqqqqq wwwww
The community participation here is more active and very diverse. In the span of 2 weeks, I've met the Microsoft-Philippines country manager and the general manager of China-DPE through events organized by the Filipino and Chinese communities here.
The next two weeks, I am off to China(Shanghai) and India (Kolkata and Bangalore). I'm looking forward to discussing strategy with our leadership team in China and to meeting our ISV teams in China and India where we have close to 45+ developer engineers delivering ISV-Advisory-Services.
