I wanted to post this earlier but sleep caught up with me. Meantime, Scoble and Long posted about it so I’ll keep the details short but suffice to say I expect us to get a call from Simon Cowell anytime now. This should be a part of the next series of X Factor for sure :)
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I'm interested to know how the developers at Microsoft manage all these products. You can only have a limited set of developers (I know you employ a lot of people) but you seem to have thousands of products, some core, some fun, some semi-serious all on the boil and you can't have dedicated developers for each and everyone, all the time, can you? For the above product as an example, do they develop it, roll it out and the team then migrates to other projects? Do they then come back together and create updates or is that a new set of developers who have to come in and work through other peoples code...?
That will be a lot of fun as part of Lips or Rock Band type game on the 360!
Have you seen the video clip promoting this Steve?
Find who did it and give them a good dressing down, it is shocking!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0zGAB40GYA
haven't been able to bring myself to watch it yet Mark. will have words :)
James
well we do have a lot of developers and they're split across product groups but we also have some development in Microsoft Research that becomes products. A nice change from a few years back when not much made it out of the labs. These folks tend to continue to work on similar products as more likely "approaches" to computing science and a look at http://research.microsoft.com will give you an idea of how they come across stuff like this. in Cambridge in the UK for example there are two guys who worked on the gaming algorithms for XBOX Live multiplayer games as part of their research area.
meantime, we have our mainstream product divions that work on things like Windows, Office, XBOX etc all of which have ongoing development and often have sub teams within that work on innovative smaller products that can become mainstream. SharePoint is a good example of this - started out as a small team doing knowledge management (evolving Site Server) and ultimately became the company's fastest growing product ever. for every one of those though there are others which don't make the cut and the teams do something different or move on. Sot of Darwinian in a way.
anyway...hope that helps explain a little!