May 31st was the 1st year anniversary of my tenure here at Microsoft. And what was a year and feels like five - there are 10 learnings that I can enlist:

1. Keep your boss happy. Keep your Admins happier.
2. Change is Constant because of Reorgs
3. In the Kingdom of Powerpoint - Whiteboarding is not really frowned upon
4. The concept of work-life balance is not an even-keeled one
5. Taxonomy debates is not fun and they happen all the time
6. Free Soda in the Kitchen is not as big a "benefit" as it was back in college
7. Think-tank session with Pizza dinners are better with wine
8. Free Breakfast is always accompanied by long meetings. In retrospect there is no such thing as a free breakfast
9. Cross Group Collaboration is a beautiful thing on paper
10. An average Meeting spawns 5 more meetings. If you do the math - you will realise why i have been out of this blog for so long despite intentions not to!

Am not sure how many of these are universal and how many are MS-Centric. But its time for me to run to one of those spawned meetings now. So....