The astute among you may have noticed that I haven't posted in awhile. The short explanation is that I left Microsoft. The slightly longer explanation is this: while I was doing my day job at Microsoft, I was also spending my so-called free time as the...

Most ISVs, Microsoft included, are very focused on technology issues. What are the features in the latest version of our product? What features do we have that the competition doesn’t? Are we faster? Is our user interface easier to use? When...

Jim Fawcette, president of Fawcette Technical Publications, talked in his most recent blog entry about the decline in programming jobs and wages, which he attributes to a combination of offshoring and the increasing productivity of developer tools. He...

We've been thinking about how we should provide the best, most valuable content we can to large numbers of software vendors. There are some channels through which Microsoft already does a fairly decent job of this: MSDN and the Professional Developer...

I'll be talking about programs available to ISVs to help them develop on new and upcoming technologies. If you're interested in attending - I will be taking Q&A both online and live at the end - you can register at http://members.microsoft.com/partner...

One of my principal motivations for joining Microsoft four years ago (when the .com boom was still in full swing and Microsoft was a very unfashionable place to be!) was because I wanted to understand what they were doing differently than the other companies...

In my current role, I'm the Microsoft business owner for the .NET Connected logo program : Because a significant portion of my job involved providing training and information about Windows Server 2003 to ISVs , I also spend time thinking about the...

I've developed a bad habit. Whenever I'm asked for marketing information and then given one of those checkboxes which allows me to specify that I don't want anybody to contact me, I click it so that nobody will contact me. It's an understandable reaction...

So as I said in an earlier post, I've been at Microsoft for almost four years. I worked in other places in the industry prior to that, in a variety of roles, including in technical sales roles. I've talked to a lot of customers, and I still have a lot...

I got a fair amount of feedback on my first post, all of it (so far) very constructive. So today let's walk through some of the queries posed. (Microsoft legal would like me to add the following disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties...

Imagine, if you will, that there is somebody in Microsoft whose job it is to make sure that companies who want to develop software on the Microsoft platform have everything they need to do so successfully. They need to have developer tools like Visual...