Tomorrow, officially. You know I couldn't leave without saying goodbye, my wonderful, invisible interwebz friends. It's been 12 years of hard work and 7 years of blogging. Seven years! I plan to pick up the blogging again, elsewhere; at least the personal stuff. Yeah, yeah, the Microsoft stuff stays...

Hova and Bing.

Computer Engineer Barbie is making me 1) love the intention and 2) hate the medium. But I 1) love that the kids are excited and am 2) throwing up a little bit. And also 1) this is not the 1950s and 2) can we stop idealizing what it means to be a woman (clearly from the perspective of someone who finds...

Kinect launched today, well this morning, at midnight . Hmm, I am a little confused if midnight is technically today or yesterday. Can it be both? I have never really seen myself as a "gamer". My exposure to video games, at least in the last decade, has mostly been limited to scrabulous/scrabola/whatever...

Windows 7 is doing great! Win 7 market share up, XP down and everything else stable or down. Holla! Sorry, I'll try to limit the self-promotion. It's just that it's getting a little harder these days. I'm just sayin'. Now just git that Windows Phone 7 into mah hands!

There are three things I want you to know about this: 1) I think that annoucing something like the introduction of a new studio via a job description is excellent PR, if it was intentional. See interwebz, sometimes leaks can be good. 2) There's a guy referenced in this article whose last name is...

Kara's full interview is here. Just when I was thinking about how dry the interview was, we got this... GREG NELSON: ...It’s fun. Like as someone that has spent 15 years now, I just had my 15th anniversary a couple weeks ago… BOOMTOWN: What do you get? GREG NELSON: You get...

Todd Bishop gets to the bottom of it with David Webster, our Brand GM. Look, we get a lot of crap for our advertising. I know this. Some deserved, some not. But I totally got the Seinfeld ads and I thought they were funny. I can understand that people have differing ideas of what is funny. But also...

For the educated (by Gawker media) reader, how much of this do you think is driven by an actual business issue and how much is driven by hubris? At what point is one embarrassed by actually behaving like a "diva"? A one hour mistake and Arrington is seeing red, and flipping out about MSN being less...

Once upon a time, Microsoft employees got t-shirts. Many, many t-shirts. It got old, as things are wont to do. Seems that Moore's law applies to tech company swag as well. Because in much less time, I've gotten sick of stickers. Arghthestickerspleasemakeitstop. Everything is not a sticker opportunity...

I'm still restricting my viewing of news. More often than not, I want the time back. Weather report, please, but hold those personal interest stories; which stations/networks seem to have increased to water down the newsy proof that we are all going to hell in a handbasket. Incidently, I own my own handbasket...

Walking the precarious line of brandiness ; companies want to be verbed, but not so much that their verb becomes generic and applicable to their competitors as well. I might argue that the genericide of google has commenced. I recently heard someone refer to googling on Bing; which is cool with me...

From Kevin Turner's speech, referencing our "Laptop Hunter" ads, at our Worldwide Partner Conference: And so we've been running these PC value ads. Just giving people saying, hey, what are you looking to spend? "Oh, I'm looking to spend less than $1,000." Well we'll give you $1,000. Go in and look...

Just found out about this from a co-worker. Evidently, we (Microsoft) have a web show about small businesses. It may particularly appeal to me because I'm a goofy, right-brained entrepreneur program graduate ("Hey, Heather...what you doing with that degree?"). I find the stories pretty interesting and...

Looks like we hired Todd Peters , the exec from Staples that handled the whole easy button thing. Which is a little funny because I told one of our vendors yesterday that I was looking for the easy button to help with getting his vendor application through procurement. Hmmm, I can haz easy button?

Don't tell me we don't have some brilliant marketers here.

But if you don't think this is cool, you have no soul.

Today I get to live one of my recruiting fantasies. Only it's totally real. And it's totally my day off. One of the huge challenges in recruiting is getting the information you need to build a prospect profile. Back in the day, when I was a line recruiter, I remember the frustration of getting specs...

same with IP and smart tech leaders. Article on how Microsoft engaged acquisition target companies . It's a little fluffy article, but talks about the importance of the people involved in any acquisition.

In conversations this week about "new marketing", or "newer". I'm having a problem with taxonomy. I know it's not "digital marketing" because moon boots are out of style and so is that term (but hey, I'm reliving 1987 this week so maybe I'll pull that term out a few times). I hate the term web 2.0 because...

I'm pretty fascinated by messaging to different audiences by culture or geography. It's the feeling when you see an international advertisement (by international, I mean non-US...please indulge my American self-involvement for a moment) that makes it a little different than the ads we see here in the...

Better .

I guess that's kind of the point. Who knew Teddy Bears could get down like that. Zune ad (Thanks Ariel )

I was going to resist writing about this, but since it relates to recruiting, I feel a little compelled to say something. This is all my opinion, not necessarily the opinion of Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. Also, since I am not naive enough to believe everything I read online, feel free to insert the...

Julian over at EXCELER8ion posts about a great video created by Microsoft employee Geert and an ad agency (hmm, sounds familiar....I hope I have as auspicious a debut with some of my video projects). It's a promo for Ad Center and in one fell swoop shows how many advertisers "don't get it" and why I...