The .NET Sweatshop (v2) : Microsoft

Microsoft Community Applications and Services: The Next Wave

SandyK — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:43:18 GMT

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 are and that we have a responsibility to not only address the feedback, but look for ways to innovate as well. So, for the past several months, we've been working on evolving our work to reflect the changing nature of community activity. Our goal is to help people be better informed, better connected, and more productive.

With that in mind, we've release a beta (or we can use Visual Studio terminology and call it a "CTP") of our new services and you'll notice a new one in the mix.

Forums: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/forums
Blogs: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/blogs
TagSpace: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/tagspace

Tagspace is our way of recognizing the value of user-contributed metadata and how important that can be in connecting people not only to valuable content, but to other people. The overall information, FAQs, videos, and other good things are here. As you can imagine, the features are not all there yet and I am sure you will run into bugs. There's a lot we are still working on and you should feel free to provide feedback (our engineering goal is to get into "release early, release often"). This beta release is the first of many steps to get us closer towards the overall vision, but we'd like your help in identifying what's next. Over the course of the next several weeks, our team wants to use the new forums to have such a conversation with you on the questions above. We know we're not perfect, but you ability to partner with users to evolve this platform will result in a solution that everyone can rally around.

We're looking forward to the feedback.

An Ode To GotDotNet

SandyK — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:31:00 GMT

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 and there was a strong proposal to end the site. Personally, I had used GDN way too much to see it go down without a fight. When Betsy Aoki left the team, I gave a little insight to the story of how we stepped up when no one else would. It's hard to believe all of that was two years ago.

It was a battle where we had some pretty nasty things said about us while we tried to right the ship. Our first move was "Project Tourniquet", which was literally to stop the bleeding. We then opened CodeGalleries and re-did the site design to usher in a new age of GDN. Outside of a tough deployment in November 2005 (when we rolled out the new chrome/site design AND moved from 1.1 to 2.0) and a pair of weird hiccups in 2006 that each lasted about a day, we've reached a smooth operating machine. I can remember when the tide truly turned. After the November 2005 deployment (at which time, I was so frustrated that I was ready to shut down the site then and there), I wrote a service to ping our eight most popular pages once every 15 minutes and ensure that the site was not only responding, but doing so with something other than the infamous "Troubleshooting in Progress" screen that so many people. As the months went on, I went from agonizing about those statistics to getting excited as the numbers started getting really good. Meanwhile, the general mood of customers completely changed. I can't tell you how many glowing mails I've gotten from people practically apologizing for their previous harsh words (although they were admittedly warranted). It's been a fun ride and we had some great uptime statistics in the last twelve months. I look at Betsy Aoki, Jana Carter, and George Bullock (the three PMs for GDN during my tenure) and see three people that helped turn site once called an "embarassment" into a legitimate example of a .NET web application. In the process, I learned a ton about running a web-site and dealing with customer requirements on the fly. You can say I owe a lot of my career sensibilities to GDN.

However (you knew there'd be a 'however'), the project we were doing in parallel with the rebirth of GDN was the birth of CodePlex. As proud as I am of the revival of GDN, I am more proud of the soup-to-nuts story of CodePlex. Jim Newkirk and I fought hard to build a site that would treat sensisbilities of a community developer as a priority and to do it from the ground up. With CodePlex, I think we really nailed it and continue to do so. As CodePlex approaches its one year anniversary and continually grows its traffic, the need for two communities from the same team addressing the same customers is nearing its end. GotDotNet hit an all-time high in traffic the month before CodePlex came out, but has been declining since then. It's clear that this isn't a conincidence. So, this summer, we will be closing the doors of GotDotNet. It was a hard decision, like having to put your dog to sleep (well, I've never had a dog, but I'd imagine it's similar). Over the next few months, keep an eye on the front page of the site to keep abreast of how we'll handle the migration. To those of you who supported GotDotNet and put such compelling content on the site, I want to say thank you. And if you have any great new ideas, I suggest you give CodePlex a try.

Oh Boise! My Second Code Camp

SandyK — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 02:37:29 GMT

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, and, well, potatoes. Granted, that isn't very worldly of me, but given I grew up in New Jersey and many people think of toxic waste, Bon Jovi, and the Sopranos (hey, we got Sinatra and the Boss too!), I guess you could do worse than potatoes.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Not only was it a nice city, but there were a lot of people that were excited by what was going on in the Microsoft developer space. We arrived Friday and started with a speaker dinner the night before the event, where 40 or so people got together to get acquainted and get some presentation tips. Jason Mauer was the only other Microsoft employee at the event besides our team, so this was clearly a community event.

On the big day, we headed over to Boise State University for all the action. Actually, before the Code Camp, I went for an invigorating 4-mile run around the campus at at 6am. On the minus side, I nearly got lost and didn't have a cell phone on me. I had visions of calling someone from my team collect and having them come find me (which I would clearly never live down). Then I realized that it's impossible to get lost in Boise and found my way back pretty easily. Meanwhile, back at the hotel, apparently there was a fire alarm and all the guests had to evacuate the building. I was completely oblvious to all of this until I got back to breakfast. There's a satisfaction a runner gets when he gives up sleep only to realize that everyone else got woken up the hard way. :-)

Refreshed by my run and armed with our Starbucks (grande sugar-free soy Cinnamon Dolce latte with whip--I can finally order that without thinking), we joined the 200+ people that attended (about as many as Tampa, which was another great Code Camp). The topics were pretty diverse, with everything from XNA to PowerShell to the Mechanical Turk search for Jim Gray. It was interesting the see the trends of what people were interested in. For the second straight Code Camp, Ruby was a hit. Also, I was surprised at how many people cared about Subversion and continuous integration (separate talks). And agile clearly seems to be hitting the mainstream, although not always in a smooth fashion (see the panel description below).

Our team stepped up with some great talks. I missed Carl Prothman's ADO.NET talk because I was watching Tim Shakarian, er, TSHAK deliver a great session on Mock Objects. Doug Seven teamed with Eric Mahlberg to give a pair of talks on Test-Driven Development and Unit Testing and then Doug followed that up with a talk on REST web services (a very hot topic for our team right now). As the lone non-dev, I opted out of speaking (I considered doing the "Intro to Javascript" talk, and then remembered that I HATE Javascript). Plus, since I hadn't given a technical talk in two years, I probably would've been rusty anyway. Of course, that's the beauty of Code Camps--the pressure is off and it's really more about the community aspect than the polished speakers. Even the seasoned veterans were doing talks on stuff they were interested in learning more than the stuff where they had tons of expertise.

One of the more entertaining sessions was the panel discussion on methodologies. It elicited a conversation that could've gone for hours. While people had some great perspectives and it was fascinating to see how other people build software, I did continually hear my agile conscience (which strangely has Jim Newkirk's voice) screaming in horror at how many of the agile concepts were being misunderstood. The implication was that you were sacraficing quality when you chose the agile route. Plus, people kept talking about adjusting their agileness for different situations (not sure, but that might have been the quote). With all due respect to those people (who I'm sure make great software), I'll use one of my favorite Jim quotes and leave it at that: "Being more agile is like being more pregnant. You are or you aren't."

Our Saturday dinner conversation was pretty entertaining. Take eight geeks, put them at a round table, add a few beers, and start a religious conversation about C# vs. Java vs. Ruby. It's rare to hear someone be so passionate about strong-typing vs. weak-typing (I prefer to think of it as flex-typing). There was also some heavy praise and criticism about Microsoft products. In both cases, there was just a tremendous amount of passion around everything discussed. During one stretch of their requests, I had hinted at one of the things we were doing with CodePlex in the next month or two that addressed their concerns (stay tuned) and a couple of the guys nearly jumped out of their chairs. The enuthusiasm overall was great. My favorite quote was from one of the primary community influencers there: "I get really excited every time I see all the new amazing stuff Microsoft is cranking out. This is just such an exciting time." It is always nice to be appreciated.

One person I had a chance to spend a lot of time with Peter Kellner, an MVP who came up for Northern California. Peter is an ASP.NET MVP and ran the Silicon Valley Code Camp. We bonded on our experiences at Cornell and went into his rapid rise in the .NET community. He's really thrown himself into the community with his blog, MSDN articles, and MVP status. We discussed some of goals for Forums going forward. Small world anectdote: I went back and looked at a previous forum post answer that I gave a few weeks ago and as it turns out, it was to Peter's question, so apparently we had indeed met before--virtually. Peter is a really good guy and it looks like I'll have to make a trip down to the bay in October for their next Code Camp. Someone mentioned that Code Camps were a little like the Grateful Dead on tour in that some people just followed them around. Maybe that's where I'm headed (cue the music to "Truckin'")...

As for our team's work (with both CodePlex and the other projects we refer to as Athens, which includes the next generation of Forums and Tagging), we didn't oversell it, but we definitely did share some of the high-level work we were doing. Our support for REST interfaces is something that customers can really get excited about. As I said to a couple of people, the user experiences that people build on top of services can often trump the original author's services (e.g., see del.icio.us and direc.tor). I'd love to see the community build their own experiences on top of our platform. We'll be releasing in early April and the feedback we can get from actually getting it out there will be valuable. For those of you attending the MVP Summit, we're planning to host a couple of breakfasts to share what we are doing and give a sneak preview of Athens. So if you're coming to Redmond and want the sneak peek, let me know.

We closed out with some team bonding Saturday night and flew back Sunday morning. It was another very valuable event and less than 48 hours away from my family--I highly recommend attending a Code Camp. Oh, and about the Idaho potatoes, the waitress at a restaurant we went to claimed that the potatoes that they used were actually grown in Oregon. So much for stereotypes...

Intrapreneurship and the Innovator's Dilemma

SandyK — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 01:39:00 GMT

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, I've tried to stray from the word a little bit because it's like one of those catchy sayings that's lost its cool because everyone uses it. It's like how Eric (one of our developers) told me how once his mom said "What's up, dog?", he just couldn't use that phrase any more. But I will ignore my one word semi-boycott for the purposes of this blog because I've been faced with a fascinating dilemma.

So, if you've read some of the blogs from our non-CodePlex side of the house like Bob, Yag, and Dave (internally, we refer to the non-CodePlex projects as "Athens"), you are probably aware that we are trying to take on the social computing technologies. Traditionally, we've been a meat & potatoes sort of group, building on-line forums, chats, and working with our partners at Telligent on blogs. About a year ago, I took this role and met with each of my new direct reports. When I met with Vikas (my Test Lead) for the first time as his manager, he spent most of our meeting on a rant about how we were continually behind the curve in what we were building (if you know Vikas, you'll realize his rants aren't quite like mine as he is far more reserved). He felt we were playing it safe, taking on projects that added value but weren't game-changers. This was just before my paternity leave, so I spent a month thinking about his words and I didn't have an answer. I wanted to say "but we're doing important stuff" (which we were), but Vikas is a smart guy and he was right. While neither he nor I would say that building something like Forums isn't extremely important to Microsoft, I think of the words of Woody Allen in Annie Hall in describing relationships as being similar to sharks: "It has to constantly move forward or it dies." I think that goes for software organizations as well. I felt this team had to move forward or it would die. Execs would question our usefulness and future investment. Our technical talent would get bored. The product management folks would be reduced to taking feature requests from product groups like a waiter takes orders from a customer (that was already happening). As the new leader of the team, I had an opportunity to make a change. While I would do everything possible to honor the commitments to the existing sites (including currently ratcheting up an entire team in China dedicated to just solidifying and updating the current Forums), I wanted to do something that would truly change the way people interacted with Microsoft.com and with one another.

A month later, I met Bob Rebholz at a time he was looking for a job. He asked for an informational interview about positions we had. For the first half hour, (to borrow a Scott Densmore phrase) I thought he was "trying to sell crazy". The second half hour, I knew he was trying to sell crazy. The third half-hour, I had my money on the table. He spun tales of tagging, social bookmarking, reward systems, and other mechanisms that connected people to other people. Even at Microsoft, we were doing some amazing stuff in the XBox division around gamer tags and this idea of building relationships on-line and he was asking why we were missing the boat. Where Vikas knew we were missing a vision, Bob offered his own as reflection of what was going around in the world around us and this notion of "Web 2.0". This was around the same time Josh and I were discussing whether Q&A Forums are truly community if there was no "sticky" connection with the people involved. I wanted to make that sticky connection that brings people back. Bob won me over by showing me the success that was already being achieved through these concepts with Flickr, del.icio.us, and several other sites. He told me how he connected to so many different people through these worlds--people to whom he remained connected. He also told me how his teenage son was using the new technologies (if you want a harbinger of many things to come in technology, watch the kids). Before I listened to Bob's take, I avoided a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff. With the exception of this blog, I didn't think I needed it. But Bob convinced my to try and now I can't live without many of those sites. But even more exciting was that this stuff was what I was tasked to do--I could work on this on behalf of Microsoft! This was community. This was risky. This was a game changer. If there's one thing I've learned from Microsoft's history, you have to be willing to "bet the company". To quote David Treadwell (former .NET VP who now works for Ray Ozzie) from one of our CodePlex executive reviews in the early stages of development, "if you are going to play, play to win".

But (yes, you knew there was a "but") not everyone embraces a big risky bet. For those who read business books, you may be familiar with "Innovator's Dilemma", the book from Harvard professor Clayton Christensen that built this notion of disruptive technologies, which upset the balance of the marketplace by rendering the incumbent technology obsolete over the long-haul. What makes disruptive technologies so potentially disruptive is that the producer of the incumbent technology has an obligation to its current batch of customers and, therefore, cannot fully invest in the new technology for fear of jeopardizing its exisitng revenue. Classic example include what digital cameras did to the photography business and what CD-ROMs did to traditional encyclopedia businesses. Whether you were Kodak or Encyclopedia Britannica, your core competency was in jeopardy. Kodak was all about the world's great film, while Britannica made a reputation on door-to-door salesman and huge collections of books that sat in your den. Suddenly, these new technologies come along with the express purpose of eliminating the need for those core competencies. What do you do? Do you jump on the bandwagon, risking your current customers for something that may or may not pan out? Do you stick with that you know and trust that the hype will blow over? There's never an easy answer. But I do know this much: if you don't take new trends seriously, one of them will obsolete you very quickly. I believe that Christensen was focusing on old companies vs. startups, so he didn't really address the concept of intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship wihthin a company). In other words, what happens when two groups within the same company have conflicting objectives as one side supports the general business while another side goes after the potential opportunity? Christensen implies that it can't be done, but companies like Microsoft do it to stay alive. Ray Ozzie is spending his days and nights making sure that "services in a cloud" trend is not lost on Microsoft, even as we are heavily invested in packaged software for tens of billions of dollars. It's not an easy thing to deal with, especially those who consider software-as-a-service as a fad. I spent months fighting conventional wisdom while we built CodePlex, where we seemed to be endorsing open source--which many saw as counter-culture to the Microsoft way of life. In fact, my real contribution to that project was managing the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt).

So, when it is suggested to me that our work with social computing ideas will do "nothing to increase the satisfaction of developers", I am not sure whether to get frustrated, upset, or laugh. Many of them are the same ones who told me not to build CodePlex. Now, in the words of Yogi Berra, it's "deja-vu all over gain" as I need to convince people that change is among us and we are doing the right thing and ask for patience. In my opinion, we were vindicated with CodePlex. Will that happen with Athens or are we going after something that is going to fall flat on its face? Are we building something that will add no value to Microsoft? I believe it will succeed, but we'll only know years from now when history will tell the story. As long as our goal is to change the game, I'm in.

"But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it."

- Thucydides

Tag, You're It!

SandyK — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:19:00 GMT

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 and they all had their plans for how the new web was going to transform their businesses and all of our lives. From Bezos to Schmidt to Ozzie, everyone was espousing the future and their take on it. With the our beta release of a project we code-named "TagSpace" (a Microsoft.com tagging engine to support community tagging), it was kinda funny to hear Bob admit that tagging wasn't a hot topic at his conference. As fast as the web moves, so too moves the attention span of the "digerati". It's like blogs. I had a blog before 80% of the people I knew, but by the time I started mine, most of the people "in the know" had long since taken blogs for granted and moved to the magic of wikis. Before I could even grok the wiki, I watched as mash-ups became the rage. I think I intentionally avoid those conferences as I would likely incur the stares of those people who realize I am still "so last year".

Of course, the funny part is that as fast as the web moves, the general public will always take a little longer to embrace it--in fact, longer than me. The good news is that it isn't all about impressing the digerati (at least that's not what I get paid for :) ). While Bob wasn't about to shock anyone with TagSpace (yet) at his conference, I separately attended a conference of marketing folks at Microsoft and, at times, I came off as a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I was explaining all the powerful benefits of tagging & social bookmarking and their relation to the long tail. The good news was, where a year ago I would've gotten blank stares that would have reeked of "what's tagging?", this year I got a lot of people soaking in my words and grasping the significance of how something like TagSpace will change the way we not only find our content, but find one another. It was less about convinvcing people why anyone would tag and more about sharing new ideas on how to use tags to better serve the customer experience. So many experiences that the marketing folks wanted could be enabled by tagging to the point where I was worried they thought I believed tagging could cure world hunger.

I'm really proud of the team for delivering the tagging engine. It's not all there yet, but that's the beauty of it. Kick the tires. Poke around. Imagine the ways you can use this to better navigate the insane amount of information we provide on Microsoft.com. And then let us know how to enable it. Some goals are obvious (such as public APIs for mash-ups and integration with other applications on microsoft.com, MSDN, and TechNet) while others might not be. I highly recommend you keep an eye on that space. Frankly, I believe a few of the things we might be able to pull off are exactly the kinds of things that the Web 2.0 Conference people are going to be very interested in a year from now. Then, maybe I can finally go to those conferences and not feel like I am wearing my "Guns & Roses" T-shirt...

[ED. NOTE: For those uninitiated to tagging or who want additional info on TagSpace, go to this link: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/beta/MSTSintro.mspx ]

Open letter to SteveB - Privatize Microsoft!

SandyK — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 19:41:00 GMT

(NOTE: I am not affiliated with the people who make these decisions, so please don't assume there's any insider info here--just one guy with one 'wacky' idea speaking his peace and throwing out some food for thought)

Dear Steve,

I see you've made your way down to Wall Street to woo the instituational investors. Hmm, well I guess we all do what we have to do. You're feeling the heat from people who are unhappy about the stock price. I gotta admit that the stock has been down since I joined nearly five years ago. Some may blame you, but I don't. I think it's insane that both you and Bill have managed to keep this company growing through everything thick and thin. Recessions, terrorism, litigation--the machine keeps cranking out more and more revenue. Now, an upstart like Google comes in with their one-stock bubble and your cage seems a little rattled. Actually, everyone else's cage is rattled and you are forced to react. Suddenly, people think our stock is undervalued (even though it's worth more than practically any other stock out there) and people can't understand why the stock isn't moving.

I know you spent a year in b-school and you probably picked up the fact that security analysis is so subjective that it is just short of voodoo. Someone once said the market is a voting machine in the short-term and a weighing machine in the long-term. I disagree as I see it at least partially as a voting machine all the time. Given there are a finite amount of dollars that are going to be invested (barring a fools' gold land rush like the dotcom boom) based on macroeconomic theory, people are going to determine whether they want to invest in us, Google, or Sun (there's a feel-good story--we're not Sun!). You're not the only one going through this as BusinessWeek had a cover story on the Blue Chips that are being held down despite great success and solid financial fundamentals. Yes, we are a blue chip and it's time we all admit it. Our days of being the darling growth company are gone, replaced by being one of the responsible corporate leaders of the world. Of course, few of those other blue chip companies are dealing with a Wall Street darling like Google, which I worry is confusing the issue for us.

Now, I had been doing my own softshoe with people who'd listen about what I think the solution is. I knew it was bizarre, which made it even more fun to propose. I kept saying Microsoft should do a leveraged buyout. I was a finance major in business school--I spent hours cranking through Excel spreadsheets figuring this sort of stuff out. Take the short-term assets to establish equity, incur long-term debt (you'd get a great lending rate from Moody's), and pull the company off NASDAQ. Get the employees involved--maybe even offer those who own stock the ability to trade those for short-term convertible bond-debt offerings in case you decide to go public again (it's been a while since I've done this stuff, so I'll leave the details to the pros). Now I don't know if those folks on Wall Street were listening in on my conversations, but apparently it has made the rounds down there as well. Apparently, Mr. Sherlund from Goldman Sachs brought it up and I think you used the term "wacky" to describe. Oh Steve, it is definitely wacky, but wacky can be pretty good too. Hear me out...

Think of what happens if you take the company private. Less pressure on short-term performance. Greater flexibility to pay higher salaries and manage market fluctuations without having to look for increased cost savings to keep the balance sheet tidy for investors. I'm not suggesting sloppy accounting, but rather an opportunity to stick to a mission and not pander to investors. Focus on profits and forecast over Wall Street pecadillos. Your only responsibility is paying down the debt. No screaming shareholders, no goofy correlation that a company's success is solely tied to its share price. You can sell off businesses that don't seem strategic without having it look like we are cutting revenues. You can do skunkwork activities without having to disclose it in an annual report, which gives the competition early information. You can spend an extra $2 billion and not have the stock market go nuts. Save your plane fare to New York as you don't have to woo investors. Wall Street is a crapshoot and trying to tie your performance to its fickle whims is not only exhausting, but it does nothing for the welfare of the business. Don't get me wrong--I've met some really bright people who work on Wall Street. However, Wall Street has its rhyme and reason and profits aren't always the ultimate driver--but they should be YOUR ultimate driver. Down in the trenches, we call that a case of misaligned objectives and our course of action is to either align the objectives or break the relationship. I think you need to do the latter at this point.

OK, you don't like debt. Maybe it's all those images of loan sharks that would break your knee caps if you couldn't pay up. Microsoft is one of the few companies that has been able to avoid it and I think that is admirable. But debt is a part of life, whether it is mortgages, car payments, or educational debt (heck, I finally stopped paying for school last year). Smart debt is what counts--can you do something better with the money than the amount you are paying in interest? Even Bill's friend Warren Buffett would agree with that. Imagine an opportunity to lead without the scrutiny. You can bring Microsoft back to basics and making decisions based on Microsoft 2010 instead of just 2006. I've heard a lot of stories about companies that sold out their future to make Wall Street numbers. I hate to think that would be us at a time when we being asked to evolve our business model.

Hey, I know it's hard. Being CEO isn't easy and, yes, I'll admit my idea is 'wacky' (I prefer drastic). But as an employee, the liberation would be exhilerating. Think about it Steve.

Your bud,
SANDY

Bob & Yag come to MSCOM

SandyK — Fri, 05 May 2006 21:04:00 GMT

For all the good and bad about Microsoft, the most important part of anyone's experience is the set of people you work with and for. Are they passionate, excited, and convinced they can change the world? Do they have that contagious enthusiasm that brings everyone's performance up a notch? In sports, there's a way of describing players that is the ultimate compliment: they make everyone else on the team better. They always used to use that phrase to describe players like Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, but it isn't always about all-star performance. Having that contagious enthusiasm can do that. For example, any Red Sox fan can tell you how important Kevin Millar was to their 2004 championship team, but he wasn't one of the top five players on the team--he just knew how to get the team going and believing. As a manager, the most important thing you can do is bring in talented people that have that effect.. I was fortunate enough to continually inherit great talent when I got to this position, but at some point, someone starts asking "hey, who'd you bring to the party?" Good question. We've been feeding the pipeline with some solid candidates and I feel like the collective talent gets better with every new hire (including going back to patterns & practices to bring over Jonathan Wanagel, who was the lead Dev for the "Shadowfax" project). It's always fun when you get some killer recruits and it's especially exciting when they are the ones that were coveted by the top product groups. It validates the importance of your mission when they choose you over the billion-dollar businesses that are out there. We've had a rash of these hires in the past month, including a couple that are on my management team that I am really excited about.

Bob Rebholz is a social networking kingpin that understands more about community dynamics that I ever will. He came over from Windows Server because he believed he could have a bigger impact here. He worked on something called the Working Network, which has the tagline "Better Living Through RSS". He's gonna fit in real well here.
And Alan "Yag" Griver is a FoxPro legend who comes to us from Visual Studio and turned down some pretty cool offers from other product groups to join Microsoft.com. As I told Yag when I first chatted with him about the job, even my cousin who lives in a rural part of Northeastern India knew who he and Ken Levy were (it's amazing how tight the Fox community is). No one has a better appreciation of the community than Yag.

I feel like a college coach that just recruited the All-American players away over Duke (yes, lots of sporty mixed metaphors--can't help it) and can't wait for the years ahead where they get to shine in carrying out a vision. Plus, as Alan points out in his blog entry, there is some pretty impressive people on this team already. I almost feel like a poser hanging with the talent here. Now, the expectations are high. For example, I love how Josh is already giving Yag requirements (for the record, I've seen the spec and it's quite impressive). We're on it, Josh.

{Red Hot Chili Peppers - By The Way}

Now I have a Microsoft Cube to go along with my Apple Cube

SandyK — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 18:25:00 GMT

I just saw this post from Korby Parnell about getting the famous Microsoft "Patent Cube". As Korby mentioned, I too received a Cube. He even referred to me as his "co-conspirator"--I think I like that term and I've certainly been called worse. :) Korby also mentioned that we also get a copy of the front page of the patent on a wooden plaque. Wow, I didn't know about that part. What a cool idea, although we will have to wait until 2009.

Getting a patent has certainly been a highlight of my Microsoft career. I think the part that makes this special is that in a big company, sometimes it's hard to be recognized for having a good idea. Microsoft said thank you with a few extra bucks in the bank account and the Cube. Honestly, I think I'll probably treasure the Cube more. It's a permanent symbol that represents a moment of inspiration that lasts a lot longer than the money (but for the record, I'll keep the cash too!). When I was at Intel, I got two patents and I've always been very proud of them. In fact, if you are ever REALLY bored, feel free to check out my work here and here (although I left the company before I got any commemorative schwag to stick in my office like a cube). Alas, those were the days when my programmer skills were worth something and I could code x86 Assembly and C with the best of them (second time this month I sound like Grandpa talking about the old days). I think the other great part of the Microsoft patent is that the idea wasn't something that we were required to come up with. It was a cool brainstorming session on my whiteboard in my old office that turned out to be a nifty idea (and the Microsoft patent people agreed). I know Google brags about the 20% innovation-time thing, but Korby and I didn't have that. We just got on a roll and proceeded to throw everything else aside for a short time while we hashed this out (though Korby certainly deserves the main part of the credit as he put most of the meat on the bones of the idea). Microsoft may not provide the official time for that, but they certainly provide the environment and the smart people. When you have that, you often do what you can to find the time (and then apologize to your spouse later for getting home so late).

Of course, the long-standing debate about patents is something I admit I haven't comeup with a well-formed opinion on (and Korby touched on this in his post). When people are protecting their inventions, I think I understand why it is necessary. After all, should software be under any different rules than semiconductors or pharmaceuticals (many open source people might say yes). But when I hear stories of law firms buying up patents for the intent of putting big companies in a position to that suffered by RIM a few months ago, I get worried that the industry will be held hostage by attorneys looking for extortion opportunities. I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV, so I can't begin to understand where that is really heading. What I can say is that corporate innovation is often measured by the number of patents filed and I'm glad I could put one on the board for the good guys (yes, we are the "good guys" :-) ).

Forums, Community Code, and The "Tyranny of Or"

SandyK — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 09:42:00 GMT

I really love our Forums. Any community is subject to Metcalfe’s Law where the power of the network is proportional to the # of users. Forums is still in its infancy and with the recent development of the community answering more q’s than Microsoft full-time employees, I think we’ve hit a possible tipping point where the community feels less nervous about answering questions. Personally, I remember being on bulletin boards in my previous life as a dev and seeing people from MS answering questions and not wanting to answer for fear of being inferior to them—“I don’t work for MS, so somebody from MS should really answer the question”. I think our Forums have moved way beyond that and I am excited about where the year ahead...

That said, there are a lot of expectations of Forums as part of the Microsoft.com Communities strategy and I've been resistant to place all of our eggs in that basket. Here’s a question I've been debating with a colleague—do you use Forums when you are just starting to learn a technology (“what is LINQ?”)? I use my days as a developer (cue the music to Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days") as my litmus test and I don’t think I used support forums nearly as much as I stole, er "borrowed", code from sites like GDN (this was before GDN existed of course, but I don't even recall the sites I used other than MSDN, of course). I loved free code and would often print out reams of it and review it at night in front of the TV (this is before I had a laptop) to see what people did to make their code run. I even went through parts of the Linux source code to understand and learn how to write leaner C code (for the record, this is WAY before I started at Microsoft)...

When I started at Microsoft after business school, to push myself back into the techie mix and re-learn the competition, I took a course on Java Distributed Computing through the Harvard On-Line Extension Program . The wealth of code I was able to “borrow” blew .NET away at the time (for the record, I got an A ;-) ). Again, I didn’t really use forums to start off each assignment nearly as much as I went on-line to SF.net, Java.net, etc. and looked at what they did to get some techniques on where/how to get started. In this case, I didn’t even steal the code as much as looked at what libraries they used and some syntax around writing Java manifests (which were a pain to write properly). I used the Java on-line forums (who am I kidding? I used Google and they took me to the forums) when I hit errors, but I definitely didn’t start there and I wouldn’t say I learned anything as much as found a healthy detour (whereas I definitely learned from the code sites)...

Perhaps that’s why I am so gung ho about the code sites and sometimes downplay my excitement for Forums. Trust me when I say I know that they are both important, but developers ALWAYS love free code and I think the community provides the best free code. I am always looking for ways to support that, which includes GotDotNet CodeGallery and some interesting stuff that you'll be seeing from us in the next couple of months. I think we've closed that gap on the Java space a bit, but it still exists. That said, this is NOT an either/or and we need to support both. I want us to continue to drive better Forums experiences, but if I have my way, the ability to share more code in the community will continue to get easier as well--and neither is necessarily more important than the other. There are lots of ways to learn about .NET and learning from the community can be the most effective way--a broader way of sharing "tribal" knowledge. I just want to open as many doors as possible for this to happen. I also believe there are ways that we haven't even come up with yet--but that'll be the community's job to let us know what we need to do. Distributed innovation--now there's a concept I can get into...

Communities and the stickiness of Q&A vs. T&O

SandyK — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:22:00 GMT

So Josh Ledgard and I have been having a discussion around what makes a sticky community experience. He recently blogged about it and the stickiness of forums.msdn.com and how I (perhaps amongst others--he mentioned "people" but he may be trying to protect me by implying there are others :) ) suggested that Forums wasn't a sticky experience per se. He believes it is inded sticky and the answerers with hundreds of posts would have to agree. But the question is: what brings them back? Is it the spirit of community? And maybe that's a better question. What is community anyway and how does the creation of it lead to sticky experiences. (Cue the music to the theme song of Cheers: "Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name...")

Everyone has their own opinion of community. I think it’s a loaded word and it conjures up images every time it is spoken. So maybe it’s helpful for me to share my images. For me (and I partly lifted this from a mail thread w/Josh), I guess my idea of community is the message board on www.orioleshangout.com. I go there for news. I go there because a bunch of die-hard fans like me who have put up with eight seasons under 500 can talk about whether Nick Markakis is Roy Hobbs, whether Hayden Penn should start the season at AAA or the bullpen, or whether Melvin Mora is worth three years and $30M. I think I visit that site for 5-10 minutes every day between March and October regardless of whether I need to or not. I know the authors and the popular posters and their previous posts help color my opinion of their latest posts--and I care about who's saying it. That’s “sticky”.

I don't feel like that the role of forums.microsoft.com nor it should be per se. While some people browse, I think people go there to find answers to specific questions. But when I see the Orioles Hangout discussions, I imagine that those discussions could happen with our software about Microsoft-related stuff. It’s less Q&A (Question & Answer) and more T&O (Topic & Opinion). No one is there out of obligation, guilt, or frenetic need to solve a problem. Again, that’s my initial image of community and is by no means exhaustive. But that type of community has helped me be loyal enough to continue watching a team that hasn’t had a #1 starter in six years, a roid-ragin first baseman, and Sammy SoSo last year. And I look forward to visiting that site again every day for the next six months and seeing what all the same guys have to say about this season's events.

This isn't meant as an indictment of Forums--quite the contrary as I think Forums is one of the most important things my team has done. But I am excited about the other ways we can create stickier experiences, not to mention increase the ways we connect customers and Microsoft employees.

Indentured Servitude at Microsoft?

SandyK — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:52:00 GMT

Does anyone notice how people love to predict the demise of Microsoft? It’s a series of Chicken Littles running around claiming the sky is falling. I’ve been at this company for almost five years and we continually operate under the specter of doom. Two years ago, I felt like there were a lot of attacks and I blogged about my excitement for the company, sharing my excitement in our new products. Seems about time for another entry.

In the last year, we’ve endured the Kai-Fu & Lukovsky departures, the BusinessWeek articles that implied a coup based on lost towels (for the record, I am a little annoyed by the towels), and everyone’s favorite anonymous blog—MiniMSFT (for the record, I agree with some of what he has to say, but I think there are two sides to most of his opinions). And, of course, the insults were hurled fast and furious when Vista decided to delay shipment of the consumer SKU.

What makes this funnier is that the local software unions (yes, they exist) keep pushing for more Microsoft people join because apparently we are being oppressed. <y dad was telling me about the article he read where the union was on the warpath at Microsoft and the time was right because Microsoft is on its heels. They paint a picture of Google being the fun spirited place Microsoft once was and that everyone is looking for the exits. But while the whole situation is comical in and of itself, there are two things that fascinate me most about the latest round of targets on Microsoft: the assumptions that Google’s fun atmosphere has capture what Microsoft has lost and that a mass exodus on talent is causing a brain drain in Redmond.

First off, the fun atmosphere. Everyone likes to talk about Google’s laughter in the hallways. Apparently, they yuk it up, everyone’s excited, etc. Heck, it sounds a little like a teenage slumber party. Sure, why not? Everyone’s rich with the overpriced stock. :-) Wasn’t that the definition of the dot-com bubble? But the humor is that in this euphoria is a symbol of what Microsoft lost, as if people are wistfully saying “remember when Microsoft was like that". What? Umm, I know I’ve only been here for five years, but I consider myself a student of the early history of this company and that is NOT how it was depicted to me. Whether tales of fact (Showstopper, the great book about the creation of Windows NT) or fiction (Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs), Microsoft has never been a place where people weren’t driven and under pressure. I do believe the common profile for a successful Microsoft employee is one that works hard and plays hard. I'm sure frolicing has taken place at Microsoft, but its probably the exception rather than the rule.

As for the departures, I think people had more to be worried about in the late 90s and early 2000s when legendary names like Silverberg, Chase, and Maritz took off. As for leaving for competitors, anyone hear of Rob Glaser or Tod Nielson. Yes, Kai-Fu Lee & Marc Lucovsky went to Google and I wish themwell. But the notion that is the beginning of the end is borderline insane. Frankly, one of the most talented guys I knew at Microsoft left for Google last year and, given his situation, I didn’t blame him. But I wouldn't make that move and neither would a lot of people I know. I'll take my chances with the people that are willing to stick around.

Look, I am not saying Microsoft is perfect nor am I saying Google is bound for failure. However, this incessant “the sky is falling” chatter is a little tiresome. So a message to the union that keeps sending me mail asking me to join: please save your postage. Or ask me about the projects that I am working that, on some days I'd do for free. Or my wife’s health coverage during a challenging birth last October. I agree with Scoble—if I am not happy, I’m not stuck. No one is a victim here, so please quit suggesting the crime. I’ve worked at multiple companies and none hold a candle to Microsoft. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I’ll never regret the time I spent--even though I haven't done a jig in the hallways.

Back To The World of Microsoft.com Communities

SandyK — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:58:00 GMT

Wow. It has been a long time since my last post. I've never gone an entire month without blogging since I started a few years ago, so this "getting back into the swing of things" thing is new to me. But, in my defense, I had a pretty good excuse--I've been on paternity leave with my new daughter. It's been a mind-blowing experience and I've had more fun blogging about that than blogging about tech stuff. Now, I am back and my job has evolved a little bit. I am now working across all of the Microsoft.com on-line community technologies. The team that I work with runs everything from on-line forums (which has gotten rave reviews from Soma, the VP of DevDiv) to web chats to the Federated Community Search that runs from within the Visual Studio 2005 and accesses relevant content from our Codezone partners. We teamed with Josh's team in Visual Studio to make a lot of that Community menu item in VS a reality. And yes, I am still part of the GDN world and we are continuing to determine how to evolve GDN. We're still trying to knock out a few glitches here and there, but the performance has been awesome (viva Whidbey! viva killer hardware!). I still hate that we were down, but Betsy still rocks and I am optimistic that we'll never go through that again (regarding her comment about coughing up her lungs, I just want to point out that she got that cough somewhere else--GDN is not hazardous to your health). The lessons learned when we did the migration are really important--I'm hoping the team writes a paper or something to make great use of the experience. I think customers can really benefit from those rough weeks in November.

Well, given the extensive scope of our team (I've only told you about that stuff I can reveal--trust me when I say we many things on tap that I can't even tell you about :-) ), it goes without saying that we have openings! It's the opportunity to work with people like Jim Newkirk, Betsy Aoki, Korby Parnell, Doug Seven, and George Bullock. We have openings for developers, testers, and program managers. Follow the appropriate links on Doug Seven's blog for more details (thanks Doug!).

Pardon the GDN Dust

SandyK — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 12:22:00 GMT

A few years ago, I read a book about the rise of AOL (it was before any mergers, so the fall wasn't documented yet). In it, the book covered the evolution of the service and recounted a time when AOL's services completely fell apart. Steve Case, the head of AOL at that time, needed to handle the customers that were let down by the service. At a time when he needed to be contrite and apologetic, Case instead thumped his chest in pride. After all, people wouldn't be complaining if they didn't care. He took a lot of flack for gloating about how significant his failure was and managed to upset all of the customers that were let down by the services. He eventually apologized and people moved on. The next 3.5 years were magic...

Well, over the last few weeks, I had a potentially Steve Case-type moment--hopefully without the foot-in-mouth, but with the follow-up success after a tough lesson. We tried the biggest upgrade ever with GotDotNet, upgrading servers (64-bit), Workspaces source control machines, .NET Frameworks (we're on VS 2005!), and a brand new UI (people seem to either love it or hate it, but everyone agrees we were do for a refresh). This was a major migration and done in little over a month. If you've ever been through a major migration, you are undoubtedly listening to my story and rubbing your scars.

Well, we are just about finished! If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. If you saw it during the tough deployment, please go and take a second look. And to you, we apologize for the troubles you've run into. The bugs we suffered through last week were painful to all of us, most of all Betsy Aoki and Pete Coupland, the resident superheroes that were tasked with the impossible mission of doing a monster job in a crazy timeframe and nearly pulled it off. But wouldn't you know it, things didn't work out and we got burned. I can't remember a tougher 2-3 weeks. People were not happy, least of all, the GDN team. So, learning from Steve Case, I will not boast about people's dependence on GDN (in fact, we're probably made a lot of people go elsewhere and that's just horrible). We let you down and we all feel terrible about it. Heck, I will borrow Case's apology from nearly a decade ago. But I will throw in one line of defense. The defense: people accuse GDN of continually being down, but this was our first real downtime in the last six months! We've worked hard to fix things and, while we're still not perfect, I hate to see everybody treat last week like a common instance. The goal is to keep getting better and we will have some tricks up our sleeve, both with GotDotNet as well as some other community resources that were touched upon at the September CodeSlam. Code doesn't magically change its DNA, so we didn't expect the perfect site. Still, no one on our side saw this coming. Needless to say, just as we were getting smug in our performance, we learned our lesson. It's just unfortunate that many of you had to suffer through it as well. I feel like when Slammer shut down SQL boxes a couple of years ago after Microsoft seemed to be on a roll regarding security issues. It was as if all the months of great work and progress were flushed down the toilet. Well, same with GDN and the improved performance of the past months. Hopefully, we can still get back on the right track in the eyes of users...

Again, we'll accept the blame as full-on downtime is something we are committed to avoiding as we attempt to win back your trust. We need your help to make it happen. Please give us feedback when you hit an error. We get hundreds of thousands of users that engage with us in use cases we may or may not have predicted and we benefit from the real-time feedback. If the site is still having problems, please let us know at the GDN feedback alias. Plus, there may be one more deployment downtime before we lock in for a while. We're hoping this one is simple, but we thought the last ones would be easier as well. Please stick with us. We'll try to do a better job communicating when this stuff happens and minimizing the time we're down.

Revenge of the Marketing Nerds

SandyK — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:21:00 GMT

Recently, Microsoft went through a major reorganization that really changes the primary leadership of this company. Three primary groups were created to divide the business into broader areas of focus. While many are speculating on why Microsoft did this, I am actually very interested in looking at who they did it with and the ramifications. As someone pointed out to me, all three new presidents (Jim Allchin will be stepping down in a year, so I am not counting him) are essentially marketing guys. Jeff Raikes was Microsoft's first-ever product manager and spent a great deal of time running the sales organization. Kevin Johnson has an undergrad degree in business administration and was the most recent head of sales & marketing. And Robbie Bach is a Stanford MBA that has marketed products throughout Microsoft. All three will report to Steve Ballmer, a near-Stanford MBA who also led the sales & marketing organization at one point. For a company that prides itself on its technical prowess, that's a whole lot of marketing prowess at the top.

The funny part is there are times when I feel like my b-school background was almost a liability at Microsoft. Don't get me wrong--it was definitely a useful education and I draw on it frequently. However, I think I didn't really get the respect until I was able to speak intelligently to the technology. That's the kind of culture Microsoft is--it's all about the technology. So the fact that arguably the four highest-ranking officials at Microsoft (not counting Bill Gates) are marketing guys is fascinating, especially on the heels of Intel naming their first-ever CEO without an engineering backgroun in Paul Otellini. Don't forget MBA and ex-management consultant Kevin Rollins taking over for Michael Dell. The next generation of the dominant PC companies is being turned over the (gasp!) marketing guys.

So what does that say about the tech industry? To paraphrase the best answer I've heard about turning Microsoft over to the marketers, it's less about technical knowledge and more about leadership. The fact is: Bill Gates didn't write a line of code in the 90s, but he is hugely responsible for the success of Microsoft due to his business savvy. While his ability to grasp technical details is incredibly important, it's his ability to translate that into a cohesive set of marching orders to enabled Microsoft to navigate through the highs and lows that were the 80s and 90s. Strong companies need strong leadership, regardless of who brings it. Bill Gates brought it and I think Steve Ballmer brings it.

Still, the question is "why marketing guys"? After all, aren't there technical leaders? Probably, but I think this is a sign of understanding that these companies have less of a technical responsibility and more of a customer responsibility. When we focus on the technology, we do a disservice to the customer. The technical guy goes "wow, this is really cool". The marketing guy goes "wow, soccer moms are gonna love this and therefore spend a lot of $$ on this". Take Steve Jobs--most hail him as a technical visionary, but he is the world's greatest marketing guy (no, that's not an insult). Wozniak was the technical force behind the early days of Apple--Jobs just put it in the perfect context. By the time Jobs returned, he helped bring the iMac to the market (bubble gum computers are hardly technical innovations) and eventually products like the iPod (plenty of MP3 players, but the iPod hit the mark). These are products that triggered a reaction from regular people. I admit that I envy that thinking and hope Microsoft does more of that. Cool doesn't make $$--changing people's lives does. I see signs, but the next 12 months will be the best indication. Good luck to Bach, Raikes, and Johnson. The world is watching...

{Coldplay - X&Y}