Bit-cycling : Microsoft

Ah, Irony

justsean — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:57:45 GMT

The guy who writes the minimsft blog has a nicely honed sense of irony.

And you know, speaking of The Commons: I trekked over there today (meh, not the sunniest day) and I have to say it's an impressive space. I walked around admiring the scope of the project, thinking "This is what Windows built. This is what Office built." I then reflected on the irony that it's Mr. Robbie Bach's Entertainment and Devices moving into the new campus with The Commons. Windows and Office funded this extravagant place for the folks who managed to burn through $8,000,000,000USD+ on the Xbox, be shown how it's done right from Nintendo with the Wii, dash the Zune against the juggernaut iPod, and have the iPhone drop-kick WinMobile to Mars.

On a good day, I can convince myself that these are important businesses to be in, and we can afford to lose money to be successful in these business.

Most of the time however, I just try to happily enjoy my XBox 360, Zune, WM6.5 (beta) phone, Media Center, and beautiful keyboard, and try to ignore the fact that I’m paying for all of those products via my stagnant stock (and my nearly 10 years of work on Servers, Windows and Office – all extremely profitable businesses that are funding that E&D campus).

So, thanks for the nice products, E&D. And, you’re welcome.

Cake Delivery Services R us

justsean — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:42:01 GMT

Yesterday morning I got a call from my old buddies on the IE team asking me to help out with a cake delivery. I was happy to help out, and Gerry’s Cakes (www.gerryscakes.com) in Menlo Park was able to pull together an awesome 3D cake with only a couple hours notice. Mozilla’s offices are 2 minutes away from the MS campus in Mountain View, so it was a short drive over to drop it off.

Al Billings wrote up the delivery on his blog, and it got picked up on Techmeme this morning (and on Lockergnome, Ars Technica, and Gizmodo – read the comments, they are hilarious).

Apparently though, according to those in the know, all this pales into comparison, when, earlier today, the cake attained the official status of “dope” earlier today when Trent mentioned it on PinkIsTheNewBlog.com.

"No meaningful competition"

justsean — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:39:52 GMT

In this article about Bill Gates' transition, we find this gem:

For much of Microsoft's existence, its two biggest money-makers, Windows and Office, have been firmly rooted on the PC desktop, where they enjoyed little meaningful competition.

Wow. Someone hasn't been paying attention for two decades. I'm sure that IBM, Novell, Sun, Apple, Mozilla, Netscape, AOL, Lotus, Real, WordPerfect, Digital Research, Ashton-Tate, Borland and the various companies that sell and support Linux don't appreciate being called "little meaningful competition."

Definitely one of the interesting things about working at Microsoft is that we have always had very strong, talented, and determined competitors.

The other interesting thing is that we're apparently always about to be finally beaten by another company. In fact, I'm sure there's an article to be found somewhere out there for each company above that assures its readers that the company has beaten Microsoft.

Apple Security Mega-Patch

justsean — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:48:02 GMT

I'm going to deviate off my usual path to do a little nyah-nyah at a competitor.

Seems that Apple issued a Security Mega-patch. From the article:

This latest update marks the seventh time Apple has released a security patch since the start of 2007. It affects Apple computers running Mac OS X version 10.3.9 and Mac OS X Server version 10.3.9. Mac OS X version 10.4.9 contains the security fixes released in Tuesday's patch and, according to the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker, will install on Mac OS X v10.4 or later as well as Mac OS X Server v10.4 or later systems.

The reason I'm relishing this is primarily because of ads like this one.

It reminds me vaguely of the "Unbreakable" Oracle ad campaigns. Those didn't go down so well, either.

There's a saying about pride and falls that applies here.

Windows and Office Launch Video

justsean — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 02:09:44 GMT

I like this one, too.

On names and codenames...

justsean — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 20:02:57 GMT

The naming of products at Microsoft is something that never ceases to fascinate the world.

The latest thing to get the blogosphere's proverbial knickers in a twist is the re-renaming of Windows Live Mail to Windows Live Hotmail. Well, guess what... I actually have no opinion on this re-rename. Why? Because while Live Mail is orders of magnitude better than Hotmail Classic, it's still not overly imaginative as a product. So, until the product is something I can really get excited about, it doesn't really matter what it's called.

Note: I did have a very strong opinion about the renaming of Windows Live Local to Windows Live Maps.I won't go into the details, but let's just say I'm a lot happier with the new name.

Anyway, on to my real topic: codenames.

Over on InsideMicrosoft, Nathan Weinberg wrote an post recently, titled "Sinofsky's on to something: Codenames must die." He discusses the "problem" with codenames in some detail, and proposes a solution:

Microsoft has this problem all the time. People are still referring to Windows codename: Longhorn today, even though the final name of Vista was announced 18 months ago, and that Vista is nearly a completely separate project from Longhorn. Windows Mobile 6.0 is probably going to be called “Crossbow” for the next year or so. Many analysts and Microsoft employees have complained of products that have better codenames than final brand names. The next version of Windows is on its third codename, first BlackComb, then Vienna, now Windows 7.

I honestly don't understand this railing against codenames. Who cares? So what if the digerati are still referring to it as "Longhorn" or "Crossbow." It really doesn't matter.

How about the people who still refer to Mac OS X 10.4 as Tiger, and to the previous one as Jaguar? (In fact, Apple had some fun with the box art for Mac OS X 10.3). Or what about the code name for OS/2 3.0, "Warp" (from a long history of Star Trek related OS/2 codenames), which eventually became a part of the product name.

Do you really think, for example, that if Vista had been called "Windows 6" during the development, the problem that "Vista is nearly a completely separate project from Longhorn" would have been avoided? We would still have had PDC03 at which we told people about the amazing new things in Win6, and then we would have dropped it all and replaced it with new amazing thing by PDC05. Nothing about the codename helped or hindered in that scenario. And for what it's worth, Longhorn was the codename for Vista for a long time after the event known as the "Longhorn reset" (all we did was start referring to the version prior to the reset as "Alpha Longhorn."

In fact, the codename thing can often be a savior, because if too much "baggage" gets attached to one codename, you can drop it and start fresh. This happens over, and over again. Blackcomb became associated in people's minds as "the next big release" and teams would start planning the grand new projects they would deliver in Blackcomb. So jettisoning the codename and picking another was the only sane idea.

Or, how about Kodiak -- the version of Exchange that would switch to using Yukon (the product eventually known as SQL Server 2005) as its datastore? That name was tightly focused on the SQL Server datastore project (not the least because Kodiak is a town in Alaska located fairly close to the Canadian territory of Yukon), so being able to jettison the name (and the associated baggage) and move to another is a good thing. What if it had been called E8 -- would that have helped, or would Exchange be getting the same heat that Windows gets about the difference between the early visions of Longhorn and the later visions of Longhorn?

In short, it really doesn't matter what you call your product. No matter what you name it, it get a set of attributes attached to it as visions turn into plans and plans turn into code. When we rename Windows 7 as Windows Coffeetable (you heard it here first, folks), there will still be tons of people calling it Windows 7. It's just a habit. 2 years later -- it won't matter any more. So, just pick something, and move on.

As a minor anecdote, a short time after we started working on IE7, there was an effort afoot to come up with a codename for IE7. In particular, we wanted a codename-series (a series of codenames related in some way: Whistler, Longhorn, Blackcomb (Windows); Platinum, Mercury, Titanium (Exchange); etc.).

Eventually, we settled on beach-related codenames (because that's where people surf -- get it?), and the name Rincon was selected for IE7. Rincon is a famous surfing beach in Puerto Rico, which has a famous road leading to -- the roadsign is here, so you can see for yourself why it was attractive. :) I believe Tony was responsible for that one. Random trivia: the codename for the version after Rincon was going to be Maui (this was "decided" a year before IE7 even shipped).

Well, as it happened, it never stuck. IE7 had been used internally as the name for so long that we never really got any momentum behind it. I offered to be the champion for the name, but only as long as management agreed to take the team to the associated beach when each product was done. That one didn't fly.

Oh, well. At least IE is already ahead of the game on the current "productname + number" naming scheme trend that Sinofsky favors.

The Birth of AJAX

justsean — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:31:29 GMT

Alex (my first manager at Microsoft) write a great article on the birth of XMLHTTP (the core technology that underlies AJAX). Definitely a great read.

Though Alex was kind enough to mention my involvement, I have to say that XMLHTTP was pretty much done before I got there. My role on the Exchange team was to shepherd the Exchange web development platform -- basically WebDAV on the server -- to shipping (granted, that took about 18 months), along with other PMs like Lisa Dusseault (who is Applications Area Director at the IETF these days) and Karim Batthish (the only one of us still working on Exchange).

WebDAV and XMLHTTP formed the core of the Exchange app development platform. One of things I did as the eventual PM for WebDAV was encouraging developers to build AJAX applications on top of Exchange long before the AJAX concept was well-understood. Needless to say, a lot of people didn't get it ("you can change the HTML in the page after it's written? Huh?"). Lots of fun.

I'm about to get all nostalgic, so I'll stop now. :)

(found via Dare -- I sort of lost track of Alex after he left Microsoft. Didn't even know he had a blog)

And the reason we don't shout this from the rooftops is...?

justsean — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:39:36 GMT

So, apparently, the Origami team working on UI for the Ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) form-factor (sexy name, eh), have been working hard on new experiences.

Apparently, it's been called by some "the best software I've seen at CES."

I have to admit, it looks damn cool. What I don't understand is why we're not shouting this from the rooftops? There was not a sniff of this in Bill's keynote (instead, we got the tour of the futuristic bustop). What's aggravating is that we made a big splash when it was first announced and got criticized for being "just" Windows XP Tablet Edition with some tweaks and a "touch pack" update, and for the expense and low battery life. Now, when we're releasing updates that address these issues, we choose to go under the radar?

Anyway, see the pictures and demos on the team's blog: http://origamiproject.com/blogs/team_blog/archive/2007/01/09/15189.aspx

One of the Reasons I went into Software Development

justsean — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 04:50:00 GMT

While back at my mother's house this past week, I found my old collection of PC/Computing magazines, which I used to buy monthly from a local store (we didn't get subscriptions in Trinidad).

One of the things I found was the January 1992 edition, which included a special "Insider's Journal" written by Ed Bott. Ed was, at the time, the Editor of PC/Computing, and he had spent some time behind-the-scenes with the development team of the first version of WordPerfect for Windows (from May to Nov of 1991) in Orem, Utah.

The article, which I read over 14 years ago, has stayed with me since the moment I read it. It describes the background events that occured in the final months of shipping WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows.

I think that this article is the beginning of my desire to go into mainstream software development. At the time, I was in my second-to-last year of High School. I had done a fair bit of programming (Basic on Apple II, and Pascal on IBM PCs, primarily), but nothing commercial.

I remember reading this article over and over again and feeling a thrill each time. The story of how they developed the product, the delays, the highs and lows, made me want to be a part of it. I'm pretty sure that at the time I thought it was nothing more than a fantasy (keep in mind that I was a high-school student on a caribbean island who pirated every piece of software I'd ever used :), but I did wonder how I could get to be a part of the WordPerfect team (these days, I think I would have to move to Ottowa, for a start).

The article includes describes many problems that I'm intimately familiar with these days: slipped schedules, the pressure of a new release of a hugely-popular product, the last few months of intense pressure, the final bugs and test passes, the importance of compatibility.

One part that made me chuckle was a discussion of how they had a whopping 180 beta testers! How the world has changed. I believe we ended up with something like 15 million beta and release candidates of IE7 (I don't have the exact numbers to hand).

Strangely enough, those descriptions thrilled me even at the age of 17. I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my career. Fifteen years later, it may not be word processors, but commercial software development is still exciting.

As an aside, while poking around to see if I could find an online version of the article, I found W.E. (Pete) Peterson's site ("Executive Vice President" of WordPerfect at the time of the article), which hosts an online copy of his book Almost Perfect. I read through the PDF version, and found it fascinating. An interesting case study in the running a business. An important lesson I picked up was the importance of not just leading the business, but building strong relationships with the people you work with. It's impossible to drive a vision unless the employees are with you.

Almost Perfect also provides some more insight (from a very different perspective) on an incident alluded to Ed's article, namely the shipping of WordPerfect 5.0 (for DOS). This product was a critical stress point for the company, which had established its dominance over the word processing with WordPerfect 4.0, and hoped to re-define the category with 5.0 (which had some desktop-publishing features among many other features).

The world-wide pressure on the team led to many mistakes in the shipping of 5.0, to the point that they had to ship and update release 2 days after shipping the product. Someone dropped a couple of unimportant files off the final disk set because the product wouldn't fit, but didn't update the installer. The files were dropped without a re-test, the installer naturally complained that two files it expected were missing. The user could just tell the installer to skip those files and everything was fine, but needless to say, WP's support lines went nuts.The new modules (graphics) also had many problems on some esoteric systems that were different from what they tested with. It was a bad time, but WP 5.1 fixed most of the problems and became the worldwide standard for DOS word-processing.

I also went through the other magazines to find the actual review of WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows in PC/Computing (a few months later, I believe). The reviewers loved it, praising how they had brought a much-loved product forward into the Windows world. There is an interesting sidebar titled "But is it a great Windows Application," in which the reviewers criticize it for being somewhat of a bastard product -- trying to reach forward into the Windows world, but with some inconsitencies usually tied to its need to maintain file compatibility with its DOS version, or to allow DOS users to feel comfortable in the new version -- with the ultimate effect being that a Windows user would likely feel uncomfortable using the Windows version WordPerfect. A small review of WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows a year or so later was also interesting because it was made with a year of experience, and a slight tempering of excitement about WordPerfect. It was an interesting contrast to read the Word 6.0 for Windows review from around the same time which practically bubbled over with excitement.

So, my thanks -- fifteen years later -- to Ed Bott for his great article (P.S. now that I realize what an impact he had on my life, I 'm now subscribed to his blog), and thanks to the WordPerfect team for having such an exciting release. :)

Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta is Public!

justsean — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:42:49 GMT

The Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta is now available for anyone to download. It includes RSS functionality built on the Windows RSS Platform.

Click here to find out more.

UI is hard

justsean — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 23:02:00 GMT

It's always nice to see someone who understands. Via Scoble, I read this post by Damien Katz about re-writing the Formula Engine in Lotus Notes. A fascinating story, but the part that made me smile was this:

UI stuff is hard, but not many people actually appreciate how difficult it is to do correctly. Everyone thinks they're an expert, but very few have actually spent any time thinking seriously about it, reading any article or books on the subject, watching users behind one way mirrors during usability tests and seeing how easily users get confused and distracted. So one day I'd had enough, I couldn't stand it anymore, I was tired of battling all day with people who thought their "little" tweak would have no repercussions whatsoever. Being a UI guy isn't just producing UIs, it also requires negotiating with lots of people, at least at Iris it did, which was the part I liked the least about the work.

Yes! Nailed it. Doing UI work is one of the hardest and least-appreciated jobs in software development. Everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks they have a clue what makes good UI. Well, very very very few people do.

To make matters worse, everyone thinks it's easy! Well, sure, once you know what you're doing, slapping together a dialog is easy, right? Wrong. Putting aside the dozens of iterations required to come up with a good design in the first place, even creating a good dialog can be tricky. There are so many things you can get wrong that people take for granted, but that make the difference between clean, elegant UI and a piece of crap.

Some day, I'll talk about the design process in more detail (though you can take a look at my story about wireless icons for some insight). For now, I'll just rattle off a few thoughts on some of the things that make to hard to get even a simple piece of UI like a dialog right.

Tab order -- it's amazing how many people get this wrong. People do use the keyboard! And it's not just advanced users. There are a lot of people who can't use the mouse.
Accelerator keys -- more of the above.
Aligning and spacing controls -- #1 way to make your dialog amateurish is to mis-align your controls.
Grammar and spelling -- okay, I was wrong. This is the #1 way to make your dialog look amatuerish.
Handle errors right --Jeff Davis speaks to this better than I can.
Using the right control in the right place -- again, I'll let Jeff's post say this better than I can.

Like any problem space, it takes experience and practice to get this right.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Edited: 9:24pm -- corrected some typos (thanks, Bruce :). That's what I get for posting without re-reading. Which, by the way, is an important lesson... always have someone else read over your text before you release your software. You, or your QA team, should be reviewing your UI with an eye for the spelling and grammar -- not to mention making sure that what you say actually makes sense.

And about that Home Networking guide...

justsean — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 08:40:00 GMT

I'm still looking for some feedback on the Home Networking Guide. As I said below, my team shipped this tool a little while back. It helps users figure out what’s the best home network (hardware, media types, etc) for their environment, helps with purchasing, and installing the hardware.

I’d love to know what people think about it.

Download it here.

Or use it online here.

And introducing...

justsean — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 13:42:00 GMT

Alright, so I’m blogging. I’m Sean Lyndersay, and I’m a lead Program Manager on the Network Experience team in Windows (at Microsoft). What’s that mean? I don’t know either, but it sounds good, so I’m going to stick with it. Maybe I’ll explain it later. If anyone cares.

Anyway, I’m out here… trying out this blogging thing, seeing if it can be useful to me, and ultimately to you, the end-user. That’s right – I’m trying to get something useful out of this. Most people who blog seem to have something witty and intelligent to say to the world. Not me. I’m just here to see if this is a useful tool for getting in touch with people that it’s otherwise near impossible to have a dialog with.

You see, what I do is simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest (at least, imho, and, considering this is my blog, my opinion’s all that counts :) things to do in the world. I build UI. That’s “user interfaces.” Or, in the current lingo, I design “User Experiences” (short form: UX). Now, as a minor aside, I like the term “experience” because it does a great job of bringing together the intangibles of UI design, but since the release of Windows XP, the proliferation of the term “experience” (and in particular, it’s rarely-seen-outside-of-Microsoft plural form) comes dangerously close to the being another “Active-“, “Intelli-“, “Direct-“ or, more recently, “.Net”.

Back to my point (yes, I had one)… My goal is to build UI that I can be proud of. And that means UI that is “great” to everyone who uses it. Of course, that definition is completely arbitrary (and that is the topic of a completely separate entry). To do that, I need feedback, suggestions, and smacks on the head. I need people to say, “this sucks” or “that doesn’t suck”, or “what in heck is that supposed to mean?” and especially, “what were you thinking?”

So, with this blog, I’m going to try an experiment. A dialog, if you will (and yes, the pun is intended). I’m going to openly discuss the UI (specifically, the Networking UI) of Windows, starting with some new stuff we’ve introduced in the beta of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.

If you reading this – first, I have no idea why you are, but thanks! – then, this is an opportunity to get involved. I hope this will be a great success and together, we can make sure Windows networking is “great” for you, and millions of other users.

Before I’m finished, since this is a litigious society, I’m going to include a little disclaimer. Come to think of it, I may attach to the page on the whole. I’ve borrowed it from the MS “wish” site, so it gets the point across, I think:

By offering suggestions through this page, you give Microsoft full permission to use them freely. We can't guarantee we will use your suggestions, but we will review them for use in future products. Due to the volume and variety of suggestions, we can't provide compensation or personal responses to each suggestion.

So there.

But seriously, I’m not out here to steal people’s ideas. I’m out here to make Windows better for everyone who uses it. If you have an idea you don’t want me to know about it – don’t post it.

Sean