Omar Shahine's WebLog : Microsoft

Good luck Dennis!

omars — Sat, 21 May 2005 21:39:26 GMT

Dennis Cheung, someone that I interviewed for his first job out of college, and someone who I managed for a while in MacBU, announced that he is leaving the MacBU for the MSN Desktop Search Team.

I seriously dig the hard work and attitude of the Desktop Search Team. They run one of the best dogfood programs inside Microsoft. Many Microsoft teams open up their product to internal Microsoft folks for "dogfooding". For those of you unfamiliar with that word, it's essentially using pre-beta and sometimes outright buggy software on a daily basis in order to vet out bugs, design issues, and solicit feedback. Some programs are better than others, and excellent dogfood programs are a sign to me that the team is excited, committed, and interested in shipping the best product. Devoting resources to an internal dogfood program are not insignificant, but doing so successfully often means that when you ship you have an army of folks who not only love your product (because they feel that their hard work is also shipping) but are also evangelists for your product.

Anyway, I have a lot of respect for the team Dennis is moving to, and I really expect great things from that product in the future. As I've mentioned before, I feel really good when MacBU veterans leave for other groups at Microsoft because I know that they always take along the pixie dust that made MacBU products so special.

Vacation over, Maui rocked

omars — Thu, 12 May 2005 07:28:24 GMT

Well I returned from a 10 day break from work this past Saturday, and on Monday I hit the ground running. Of course before I left for work I made two big mistakes. I subscribed to these two mailing lists at work and I didn't want them filling up my inbox so I created some rules. Well I made a mistake, rather than filtering mail sent To a DL I filtered the mail From a DL. Well this is interesting in that if you do that and you get a message from some one who is a member of a DL, then the rule kicks in. I guess that makes sense, but the end result was hundreds of duplicate and redirected mail to these new folders. Ick...

Anyway, by the end of Monday I had managed to go from about 400 messages in my inbox to 5 messages. I did not check mail while on vacation. Not once, and that was the bomb. Not only did I go from 400 to 5, I did this on a rather busy meeting day. This was all possible because of:

Much of the email was thread based where I needed only the most recent version, so those were easy to delete. A bunch were questions I needed to answer, so I did. A big chunk were reference type information. This is where I love ClearContext. I can easily assign a topic to a message and hit Alt-M which files that message automatically to a topic based folder. This is FAST. No expanding folders, drag and dropping a message etc. Saved me a lot of time.

This made me realize something else. This was the second time this year I went 7 work days w/o checking email. You know what? It worked. I trust that when I get back to work I have a system that allows me to process all the stuff and get back in the game w/o increasing my stress level and ruining my vacation. Microsoft gives me 15 days a year where they pay me to do nothing... doing email on vacation is essentially losing out on time my mind needs to not do anything work related. I can tell you that I started Monday with a lot more energy and excitement specifically because I avoided thinking or doing work while relaxing.

Back to Maui. We thought we would do all this stuff on the island, but the place we stayed was in Kapalua which is about an hour north from the airport. Not close to anything really. So we basically sat on the beach, sat by the pool, drank good stuff, ate good stuff and had a good time hanging out.

Oh, and I learned to play Golf. I think I like it. I'm going to start going to the driving range near my apartment, maybe even get some clubs since I'm so tall and was told not to mess around with short clubs or I would develop bad habbits. My wife happens to be an excellent golfer (golfed since she was 8), so she is pretty happy about all this.

Interesting things Jimmy did see

omars — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 08:11:24 GMT

My good buddy, Jimmy (a.k.a. JimmyG) who no longer works for MS, spends all day taking spy photos of interesting things in Dubai, U.A.E. He happend to grab a pic of a very rare Mercedes G Class, and Microsoft's CEO walking with the Crown Prince of Dubai.

New VP of HR for Microsoft

omars — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 06:45:10 GMT

Lisa Brummel was just named Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft. Previous to this role Lisa was Corporate Vice President of the Home and Retail division, which is where the Mac Business Unit has been located for the past few years (before that, MacBU was in MSN for a few brief months, and before that in Business and Productivity Group or BPG).

What I found more interesting is that the mention that Ken DiPietro, the former VP of HR, was replaced is in the middle of the press release. It didn't say where he went or what happened to him. Not sure what to make of that. The only thing I remember about Ken was 1) He was the dude that changed our benefits last year by altering our ESPP program and altered our prescription drug program a bit, and 2) can't remember, but I think I took some on line training as a result of some email that was sent out.

"Brummel replaces Ken DiPietro, who served as corporate vice president for Human Resources for the past two years."

I think the cuts could have been a LOT worse. But needless to say they were not popular. As it stands, the ESPP program isn't really very worthwhile compared to the old program.

But anyway, Ken was in this role from Dec 2002 till now. He was hired outside Microsoft and is being replaced by a long time Microsoft veteran that Steve has a lot of respect for (you could tell from listening to Lisa that she was highly regarded by Steve and Co.).

I'm sure Lisa is excited about her new role, and well I wish her luck! She has lived and breathed working in Product Groups most of her Microsoft Career and probably understands us employees better than anyone.

Microsoft Internal Recruiting

omars — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 00:35:35 GMT

Is the tech job market heating up? Hell yes. In the last 4 months I've been cold called by 3 recruiters. Additionally, there is a lot of new headcount on the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus. However, since my time in Hotmail I've personally hired 2 folks and they were both internal hires. Why? Because there are a lot of people in the company who have been doing the same product or discipline for 5+ years. After doing something that long, it's only natural to want to try something different. For me there were a lot of reasons to move from the MacBU, but the big three were 1) new career growth opportunities, 2) working in a super competitive and exciting technology segment, 3) increasing my scope of influence and impact within the company... In that time a lot of people I worked closely with in the last 6.5 years in the company have also changed jobs, and some are even working with me again. The Microsoft workforce is staying with the company longer and there are a lot of folks reaching their 5 year anniversary in the same team.

I think that's one of the coolest things about Microsoft. As a Program Manager, Developer, Tester, Product Manager etc you have the core competencies go to work on pretty much any product group in the company. Personally I can't see myself working on any given product for less than say 3 years, but once you get to 5-6 there are just so many interesting opportunities either at Microsoft or elsewhere. On our campus, Silicon Valley, there is of course a very limited number of product groups (less than 12) so you tend to see folks doing the same job in the same group for longer than you might in Redmond.

So it comes as no surprise that I read this earlier today. You know, it's a lot easier to make a hiring decision when that person has a proven track record within the company. The internal candidates for jobs are usually a the top of the fold when interviewing for job positions as they have a lot going for them (usually). I suspect that due to the difficulty in finding good external candidates in the tech industry, there is a lot more internal transfers happening.

Microsoft in the fight against HIV

omars — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 03:10:00 GMT

Now this was a really welcome development to read this morning. This is freaking awesome.

It's amazing that software viruses basically mimic the behavior of real medical viruses and our leanings and attempts to fight software spam etc can be used to help doctors and researches fight HIV.

I wonder if this kind of work will start to change public perception among those that think we are evil. I wonder if the pundits will have a way to spin this negatively. I hope people start to understand and appreciate the contributions of our Research Group.

Green Cups

omars — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:43:00 GMT

This week at work we had a small change to our cups. For the last 6 years I have been drinking from an orange cup. This week they were green :-).

PowerToys

omars — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:18:00 GMT

Raymond has a great post on the history of PowerToys. I'm proud to be a member of this family. The first code that I ever wrote using VB.NET shipped as the Dictionary Tool for Tablet PC, and my latest PowerToy, Send to OneNote from Outlook was a result of hundreds of man hours of leaning how to write (and deploy) managed code for Outlook. I think the first project (learning to program from scratch) was actually easier than the second :-).

One might wonder how you turn two projects like this into PowerToys. Well I am not a member of the Tablet PC team, nor am I a member of the OneNote team. I wrote both of these when I was in the MacBU. I'm a member of a lot of dogfood/product distribution lists at Microsoft (social hangouts for geeks). It's one of the cool things about Microsoft... we have these private internal product love fests over email, and most of the time we get to try new builds, ideas, etc. Well I happen to be on a Tablet DL and a OneNote DL and when I finished my two projects, I sent out some emails letting people know they could try them. In both cases folks on the respective teams proposed shipping them as PowerToys. Getting them out the door isn't as bad as Raymond says, but it's not easy. You basically need some level of basic testing, and the dlls and exe's must be code signed using your smartcard, then signed by Microsoft. It's really a matter of time and resources.

I actually think that it would be great if Microsoft had an incentive program, or allowed employees to work on collaborative PowerToys and ship them. There is so much cool software internally.

So long MacBU, Hello Hotmail

omars — Fri, 14 May 2004 11:27:00 GMT

Well, today was my last day in the Macintosh Business Unit. I've worked here ever since I joined over 5 years ago. I feel privileged to have worked with some of the folks who are still here or moved on before me. I had a truly amazing time working on OE, Entourage, IE, MSN, and Virtual PC. It's funny to think back of the days when I first joined. My first visit to Redmond, my first Release To Web, working on a top secret project (Entourage), and most recently learning an entirely new product. I'll always look back on these last 5 years as some of the best times in my life, and I'll very much miss the people.

The good news is that I'm not going far. Monday morning I'll be working one building over on the Hotmail Frontdoor team. I'll be a Lead Program Manager on the Frontdoor infrastructure. My team is responsible for things like DAV, Passport, POP, SMTP and various other Frontdoor protocols as well as a number of other things (many of which I don't know anything about). I'm happy that I'll be doing mail stuff again, but working on a service rather than a fat client. Plus I'll be working with Reeves Little again (Reeves used to be the Test Lead on OE, now a PM in Hotmail).

I decided to pursue this position for a number of reasons, and much of it has to do with where I want my career to go in my next 5 years at MS. I also find that I want new and different challenges. I've been working on Mac related software for a long time and am looking forward to something that's on a totally different scale ;-). Hotmail is something that I feel is a great match because of my backround in mail stuff and my interest in the stuff they are doing. I think the free mail space is getting even more competitive, and I love competition!

So, my office is all packed up (it all fix in 8 boxes!). Not that much stuff. I'm off to my 10 year high school reunion this weekend, and come Monday I'll be sitting in my new office.

Bedlam

omars — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 02:25:00 GMT

When I joined Microsoft this story was already very famous. There have been a few instances since then where people would reply to mysterious DLs saying take me off this and then the flury of replies. However, someone who has been here long enough usually says “remember bedlam”.

Dan Crevier is blogging

omars — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:18:00 GMT

Dan Crevier finally started a blog. I met Dan when I was a sophomore in college on an e-mail list for Claris E-mailer. Dan was getting his Ph.D. in Biophysics from this little college called Harvard, and writing code in his spare time. Dan ended up doing some contract work for Claris where among other things he helped create a Japanese version of the product (Dan apparently picked up Japanese while he was in Japan for a few months). Anyway, Claris had no clue about the internet, and let a beautiful product die a slow death. Meanwhile, the creator of E-mailer, Jud Spencer, was hired away by the then growing Mac Internet Product Unit (MacIPU) where he seemingly disappeared to work on “something”. To us outsiders it was either Internet Explorer or Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE 4.0 was a junky piece of software compared to e-mailer, but I had high hopes that would change with Jud and Dan (and later David Cortright) at Microsoft.

Somewhere around my senior year I started the now dead Unofficial Outlook Express page, my claim to fame I guess. Dan got hired by Microsoft after he got his Ph.D., as did many other Claris and former Apple employees (most who worked on OpenDoc or Cyberdog). Some months later I started an Internship as a tester working on Outlook Express. Back in those days Dan would come by my cubicle every day and show my some cool feature he did (we had a long list of features that we wanted to do, and we knocked almost all of them off over the next few years). It was a total blast. I was such an annoying and bothersome tester that they decided I’d probably make a good PM where I could annoy and bother developers to my hearts content ;-) (rather than the other PMs).

Anyway, Dan is simply a coding machine. For most of his 5+ tenure in MacBU he was the #1 bug fixer, often fixing twice as many bugs as the next developer. I had a theory about how Dan got all this work done… he has a small company in India with 2-3 employees that wrote code while he slept at night ;-). Anyway, Dan, myself, and a few others were responsible for shipping Outlook Express 5, and then we all transitioned to work on Entourage 2001 which was the super secret product I mentioned that Jud was working on all along. Outlook Express 5 was really a snapshot of the Entourage 2001 codebase minus a lot of features. We had a hard time deciding what to remove, and the problem we feared and ultimately realized was that OE was too good. Our customers loved it so much that we had a really hard time convincing them to use purchase Entourage 2001.

Dan quickly rose through the ranks of MacBU. He quickly became a Development Lead, then became a Development Manager and was responsible for all of the Mac Silicon Valley products (IE, OE, MSN, Entourage, PowerPoint, VPC). However, with all this new responsibility you could still convince Dan to fix your pet bug or tweak a feature (some of us even got our pet bugs fixed as wedding presents). Dan recently left our sunny state for Redmond where he is now an Architect on Longhorn as part of the ConnectUX team. I think this is great for Dan and for Microsoft. It’s easy to get upset when such valuable contributor leaves our business unit, however, I’m always encouraged that they will take some of the MacBU pixie dust and bring that to other parts of the company.

Some interesting tidbits about Dan are that he used to own the domain http://www.boingo.com for his Oingo Boingo website. However, he recently sold it to Boingo Wireless. Dan also wears shorts every day. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in pants. Anyway, I wish him the best of luck. However, if he doesn’t check any code into Windows by the end of the month I quit ;-).

Another MacBU blogger

omars — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 03:06:00 GMT

I think that brings us up to 4-5 bloggers in MacBU? Not sure. Anyway, Rick Schaut has been working on Mac Word for almost half my life (14 years) ;-). Welcome to the blogsphere.

Bill Gates on Orkut.. well not really

omars — Sun, 25 Jan 2004 11:46:00 GMT

Well, no he isn't. But if you look in the Microsoft Community, there he is. Of course it's a fake: spoofed. I guess Orkut is no different from the net. Anyone can pretend to be anyone.