After six years at Microsoft, I’ve decided that it is time to move on with my career and my life. I’ll be taking a role at a software startup that appeals to both my passion for the user revolution on the internet and my desire for a smaller, more personal...

Has any company garnered as much attention in such a short-term as Facebook? Yeah, you can suggest YouTube or Skype, but Facebook went from hot to scorching hot in the course of a few months. Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns MySpace, showed some major...

The business mantra for years has always been "The Customer Is Always Right". I recall reading business school case studies about how comapnies like Nordstrom were phenomenal is how they made sure customers were extremely satisfied--going to unimaginable...

When I talk about the value of community for developers, I've been known to quote what I've come to describe as "Rumsfeld's Dilemma". As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That...

We hear a lot of feedback about how the forums and blogs should work. And I mean A LOT. Whether it's internal or external, people always have opinions about how to make them better. I prefer to think that the feedback is proof of how valuable these services...

I was watching a great presentation recently from a Berkeley professor who came to speak to a bunch of senior people in my division. He threw out a lot of interesting sayings, but my favorite one may have been "the most dangerous three words in the investment...

While CodePlex has had a pretty good run, we've gotten some flack for having only offering Team Explorer to work with our source control system. Personally, I use it on the internal CodePlex and it has positives and negatives. That said, there's nothing...

I spent my December break reading "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. OK, maybe I was a little late to that book, but better late than never. While I can't say the book told me any specific fact that I didn't know, it's ability to wrap up the last...

About two years ago, I stepped into this role with a primary responsibility being to help get GotDotNet back on its feet. As the first Microsoft community for .NET, GDN held a dear place in the hearts of many. However, it had clearly fallen on hard times...

Last weekend, four developers from my team and I headed over to Boise, Idaho for my second code camp. Having never been to Boise, I was almost more curious about the town than the Code Camp itself. After all, my image of Idaho was rural farmland, potatoes...

I've always joked to my wife that if I wasn't married, I'd probably get a cot and sleep at Microsoft on the nights when I really got into my work. Well, thanks to the latest Seattle weather debacle, I ended up doing an all-nighter at Microsoft. Herein...

OK, apparently there's this meme thing going around where people are tagging one another to find out five things that most readers wouldn't know about the blogger. I think it's a pretty cool idea and now that I've been tagged by three people ( Andrew...

Following up on the Yahoo memo, I found it interesting to read the section regarding the effort level at Yahoo. I believe the larger your company grows, the harder it is to get everybody driving hard--especially at the levels of a startup. For as much...

The shakeup at Yahoo is a fascinating reflection of the life and times of a tech company. Now many consider Yahoo a competitor to Microsoft and I have no interest in disparaging their company, but this is an interesting business case study and there is...

Why yes, I did. In the words of Jim Newkirk, I "drank the Kool-Aid" and picked one up. Rarely have I seen such a fascinating launch of a product from Microsoft--it's certainly the most interesting in my 5+ years here. The first thing everyone does is...

Has anyone else noticed how much the word "innovation" gets tossed around lately. I think it has always been important in the technology industry where it is seen as the holy grail. We all aspire to be innovative and be called innovative. Personally,...

Bob Rebholz , our resident Group Product Manager and all-around sharp guy, just got back from the Web 2.0 conference. When he mentioned he was going down there, I had little idea about the magnitude of the conference. Silly me--it seems everyone was there...

The challenge of being a fan of open source while working at Microsoft is that people often assume that it's not possible for Microsoft to appreciate open source. If there's one legacy that I'd like to leave at Microsoft to this point, it's that I fought...

For the last few weeks, I've been spending one day a week sitting in the shared workspace that several members of the Microsoft.com Commuinities team uses. We have about nine people sharing one large office in Building 6 that was once home to Bill Gates...

I was taking a look at the latest news around CodePlex recently and I started noticing a fascinating trend. Many people have described us as "Microsoft's SourceForge Killer", suggesting we built this site to eliminate SourceForge. In fact, that's a trend...

Along with CodePlex, our team builds community applications for Microsoft.com. Included are the Forums , Chats , Blogs , etc. One of the interesting things that has happened over the years is that our applications have managed to stay somewhat siloed...

So I'm not exactly what you'd call an early adopter. Sure, I try to stay up-to-date with all the trends, but I've always had a saying that I (like many people) like to be second. I want to get something early, but I'd rather see someone else have success...

When I was much younger, I used to pepper my dad with constant questions about how things worked or who invented what. My dad would always respond with the same thing: "go look it up". Sitting in our family room was a bright, shiny set of Encyclopedia...

As I was going through my Inbox, I spotted a comment to my blog that seems especially connected to my last post. Apparently, last week, I was indirectly "Digg"'d (Dug?) when someone wrote about the OpenOffice ads and linked to my post from February ....

(title is a reference to an old Gin Blossoms song--if you remember it, that makes you old) A couple of weeks ago, a few of us were having a discussion about customers and their ability to serve as evangelists. We talked about how Apple, Linux, and...