The .NET Sweatshop (v2) : communities

Yet another blog post about Facebook

SandyK — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 21:35:00 GMT

Has any company garnered as much attention in such a short-term as Facebook? Yeah, you can suggest YouTube or Skype, but Facebook went from hot to scorching hot in the course of a few months. Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns MySpace, showed some major envy when he suggested that his property wasn't the hottest on the web any more. Sergey Brin is publicly speculating on whether they'd even accept being acquired (which essentially suggest that he'd be an interested buyer). And just this week, they acquired Parakey along with key guys from Mozilla. Man, that is one heck of a run.

Personally, I signed up a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss is about. Instantly, I received a lot of "friend requests" from people all around Microsoft who are riding the Facebook wave. From many people on my team to people I've met only a few times. It was fun to laugh at people complaining about their cars or refrigerators. Heck, I was fascinated to see where some people went to college or worked before Microsoft. And true to its name, it did feel a little like looking at a live Facebook like the ones we used to have in high school and college.

On Monday, Alan Griver and I had an interesting discussion about what the future held for Facebook. Personally, while I've enjoyed it, I didn't know whether it would "change my life forever". I'd say blogging has changed my life in this respect as I have a continuous of my professional life (this blog) as well as my personal life (my Live Space) and even my journal as a baseball fan (http://fourthplacebirds.blogspot.com/). But would I stay connected closely to Facebook? Maybe. Alan seems far more convinced. He's a much more social person than I am (a "yellow", as he likes to describe himself) and perhaps this plays more into his personality. He's using the mobile piece, twittering, biting people into zombies (if you don't know, don't ask), and joining groups left and right. He raves about instances where knowing the inside info has helped him or a friend. Now, maybe I am the curmudgeon in all of this, but in most cases, if I care what someone is doing or thinking, I'll ask. I have ~20 friends at this point, which is fairly manageable. But at some point, it'll get unruly, won't it? Alan has 60+ friends and if they are each staying active, isn't that information overload? It makes me think of the world's contradictions: if we have all this diet food, why is the world fatter than ever? Or if computers are supposed to make our lives easier, why are we chained to our laptops doing e-mail? In this case, if we are already overloaded with e-mails, v-mails, IMs, etc., isn't Facebook & Twitter going to make things worse?

My take: I think that answer is that if you use the technologies correctly, they can be very valuable. It's like RSS. Unless you are Scoble. you can't handle hundreds of RSS feeds a day--and frankly, that would defeat the purpose. Ideally, you want the most relevant information pushed to you as it becomes avaialable. I have ~50 RSS feeds, but on a given day, only 5-10 will be updated and that's a nice 10 minutes I read to get better informed on a few topics that are near and dear to me. By the same token, I think there are probably a handful of friends that I'd like to stay in Facebook-like contact with. For example, it'd be interesting for a development team to have a Facebook group as it's a useful mechanism to keep the flow of communication going (as well as get to know one another better). I know I already subscribe to the blogs of everyone on my team to stay up-to-date on what they're thinking and I could see Facebook being an effective approach to achieving that. And of course there are applications outside of business. I spent last night selling the idea to my wife about how it would make for easier communication with the other mother's in setting up playdates or planning group events--at which time, she proceeded to waste two hours roaming all around Facebook looking for friends and old Stanford classmates, with the occasional outburst of "oh, check this person out..." Yep, she's hooked. Sorry Rupert, I guess you're right. Everyone IS going to Facebook.

Oh, and no, I didn't touch on the "Facebook as a platform" concept. That's another blog post...

Rumsfeld's Dilemma and the Community Cure

SandyK — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:19:00 GMT

When I talk about the value of community for developers, I've been known to quote what I've come to describe as "Rumsfeld's Dilemma".

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

Actually, it's also how I described my first year of fatherhood, but that's another story altogether. For the things we know we don't know, that's really what search engines are all about. If you know you don't understand what ActiveDirectory is, you will go to Google or Live Search (or Wikipedia) and get up to speed on the topic. I'd like to think our forums provide that abilityas well. If you have a problem and can't find it through search, you post a question and someone from the community shares their wisdom. But things get interesting when you talk about things you don't know you don't know. Let's face it: how do you search for something if you don't know if exists. Well, that's what I think this new wave of on-line experiences (must...resist...saying...Web 2.0) provides. Blogs, tags, voting systems like Digg--they all illuminate what you didn't know needed illuminating. When I subscribe to certain blogs, I usually assume they are going to keep up on the latest trends. I didn't know about twitter, but by subscribing to Steve Rubel's blog, I probably caught on before many people. If you are an ASP.NET developer, how do you not read Scott Guthrie's blog? If it's important to .NET web applications, he's gonna be the first to know about it and he's not shy about sharing it. My favorite example is someone on our own team. I realized need to pay attention to Brad Wilson's blog a little more closely because he seems to catch on to things six months before I go on my little technical excursions. For example, when I started teaching myself Ruby and Powershell and knew what I didn't know, I kept coming up on Brad's posts even though he is on my team and I should've been paying attention in the first place (when I didn't know I didn't know). In Brad's case, I read his blog, but I guess I shouldn't have just been paying attention to the CodePlex-related stuff. :)

The value of getting information to fill the holes of knowledge is something the internet has always provided. But just like the friend that introduced you to your favorite rock group or favorite author, the internet can make the world's epiphanies your epiphanies. This may seem like common sense to any who has made the internet a part of their lives, but there's a lot of people out there who haven't reached this point. The on-ramp is easy. Subscribe to RSS feeds. Tag data and look at what other people are tagging. Find your on-line trusty source of cutting-edge info (hint: it's not CNN or CNET. If you've waited that long, it's too late) and follow what they are reading and saying. Truly reaping the most from the web requires a level of open-mindedness and willingness to trust the community to know more than you do. Then, and only then, do you overcome Rumsfeld's Dilemma.

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.

The Death of the Smart Client is Greatly Exaggerated

SandyK — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:24:00 GMT

I was watching a great presentation recently from a Berkeley professor who came to speak to a bunch of senior people in my division. He threw out a lot of interesting sayings, but my favorite one may have been "the most dangerous three words in the investment community is 'This time, it's different!'" When I see a lot of what is going on in the industry, I get the same sense of deja vu. Advertising business models. The death of the PC. The idea that XML will change the world. And, of course, the network is the computer--where the offshoot is that the browser is more important than the OS. People, we've been here before. Now, don't get me wrong--I do think things are different this time and I do believe changes are afoot and I am bullish about those changes. However, the MVP Summit that took place a couple of weeks ago was a great reminder of the fact that the world is not 100% sold on browser apps and there's plenty of power in the "Smart Client".

It started when I met up with Billy Hollis for the first time in a couple of years. Billy and I spent a lot of time together during my days in patterns & practices, but hadn't seen one another lately. Billy, the King of the Smart Clients, still felt pretty good about the importance of client apps and the fact that ASP.NET did not need to be the lone choice for developers out there. It was nice to get the gospel (and those who know Billy realize that with that southern accent, gospel just seems like the right word) that didn't imply that everything needs to be intermediated through a browser--which, in my moments of frustration on the topic, make me think of being told all food needs to be fed through a straw. The next day, I met up with a host of MVPs for a breakfast that was organized by Alan Griver (aka Yag) from our team. We shared some of the social computing stuff that we're working on and integrating into the upcoming releases of Forums and Blogs. While the response on the new ideas was good, there were still many who loved NNTP and wanted it supported. It mostly wasn't about the technology, but rather about some of the things you just can't do with a browser app, such as successful off-line operation. I guess AJAX isn't that asynchronous.

No matter how wonderful AJAX becomes, it will never provide a richer customer experience than a smart client. I know--there are those out there who will disagree. Hey, I know I prefer poking around an AJAX site instead of downloading an EXE file, installing it, and then finding out it stinks. In many cases, I admit that I don't bother getting that far. But to rely on a browser as the sole means for access? I don't know if that's an ideal long-term strategy. Personally, I think it's the difference between the person you want to date and the person you want to marry. A browser app is easy, quick, no fuss, no deployment hassles, install files, etc. It is one URL away and, if you don't like it, you move on. No commitments, no strings attached. It's dinner and a movie. A smart client requires deployment, installation, OS compatibility (though browser apps have to now deal with browser compatibility), DLL installation (notice I didn't say "hell"--we don't have that any more, right?). etc. It's a much more committed relationship, in a sense.

Many of my single friends love the former, but (and I suppose I say this as a happily married guy) the browser app is fleeting in the long-term when compared to the benefits of the smart client once you know you're ready to commit. Once you are sold on the service, you have to be frustrated by the things you can & can't do in the browser. All this computing power and I am at the mercy of my network bandwidth. The sandbox nature of a browser is great when you don't trust a site, but when you do (as I do with Amazon, eBay, and several other established brands that have given me great customer service and earned my trust), it's incredibly limiting. As one example of someone who saw this and wouldn't compromise on the experience is Apple with iTunes. You would think Apple would rather create a browser-based application with a plug-in than have to support writing an application for (gasp!) Windows. But they continue to write and update it. Why? Because I don't think you can build that rich an experience through a browser. Will you ever? Perhaps, but by then, client capabilities will have increased as well and Apple will have done something new that the next versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari won't allow.

So what happens next? I have a belief that technological progress is often affected more by trends than by need or opportunity (not always, but often). If people believe AJAX-enabled browser applications are the future, the Smart Client becomes an after-thought and investors/large companies/etc don't want to go in that direction. I am hoping that is not the case here. I think the rise of APIs, which is thriving as a mash-up technology, could give way to an increased number of smart client applications. An example that has worked for me in Flickr. I like the web API, but I've started using some of the smart client apps to handle the heavy workload tasks (like batch uploads). The Flickr Uploadr is a great utility, but doesn't get the "ink" that any Flickr mashup gets. Personally, I think the ideal would be to do what Microsoft gives you in their messaging offering. To give Outlook & Exchange their due, you have two ways to access your e-mail. There is Outlook for richer processing of data, off-line usage, and access to the hard-drive for archives. Then, there is Outlook Web Access when you are on a kiosk or another person's PC or if you don't want to start up Outlook and just need a quick & dirty way to check if you have mail. Personally, I use both very liberally. I think you could make a really good Amazon application. Or eBay. Maybe they could happen. Maybe I could beg Billy to write them...

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 ]

My name is Sandy and I am a Wikipediaholic

SandyK — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 05:04:00 GMT

When I was much younger, I used to pepper my dad with constant questions about how things worked or who invented what. My dad would always respond with the same thing: "go look it up". Sitting in our family room was a bright, shiny set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas. Now, I don't know if my dad made me look things up because he wanted to teach me to be self-sufficient or if he just didn't know the answers. Either way, I did feel this sense of independence of going out and finding the answers. And I would not only find the answer to my questions, but also answers to a lot of other questions that I didn't know I had. Clearly, intellectual curiosity was satisfied by encycolpedias and I spent several years at home or in the library, perusing the large books of information. Then came the internet and suddenly answers to tons of questions came pouring out onto a screen. Any topic in a timely fashion and easy linking from one piece of information to another. I remember getting hooked in 1994, soon after Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. Having already been a huge fan, I spent hours in the CompSci lab in Upson Hall at Cornell, surfing the web (on a Mac, no less!) for information on Nirvana. Everything from song lyrics to conspiracy theories about Cobain's death. I was clearly addicted All I could think was "where was this when I was 10?" Of course, I needed to know where to look for different things and there was definitely a disparity in the quality of information. And, of course, there were the deserted sites that showed promise before the owner decided that the thrill of running a web-site was gone. Suddenly finding useful information became difficult because of all the noise out there. Of course, many credit Google for reducing the noise with their powerful search engine. But there's no standard level of information or necessarily any topic focus. Instead, I could get a random article or something about another topic that refers to my specific topic of interest. That's why, of late, when I want information on a particular topic, I forego the primary search engines and often go directly to Wikipedia.

No, this isn't meant to be a blog to tell you about the hot new site. Wikipedia seems like it has been around forever. Rather, as I reflect on the way I use the internet, I am stunned at my reliance on it. Any time I want a relatively objective scoop on a topic, I head directly to Wikipedia (actually I use the Wikipedia gadget off my Live.com home page in most cases). The breadth and depth of topics is phenomenal as is the currency of information. The community feels a true ownership of the content and take it upon themselves to keep the engine running. I've often thought about why the content owners do it after so many special interest sites (and now blogs) fail to be maintained. Why doesn't a topic just die? And to be fair, perhaps some topics have died. However, most I have visiting are incredibly current. I tend to think the quality of information is due to the ownership of the collective. There's something about being depended on as part of something bigger (think global, act local). In addition, the ability to open editing up to multiple people helps keep it more objective as people seem to almost police one another (as opposed to needing a uber-authority to monitor every change). But even through it's objectiveness, there's a level of informality that makes it even more appealing. So when I surf to the [ex-football star] Maurice Clarrett page or the "Welcome Back Kotter" page (yes, it's funny the different topics I find myself looking up), it's amazing how up-to-date it is (fyi, there's a "Welcome Back Kotter" movie coming out with Ice Cube as the star!). I remember talking to Ward Cunningham about it last year and he was commenting on how fascinating the coverage of Katrina was. It became a news source that was constantly updated and as many people were using that as were using many of the top news sources because the Wikipedia information seemed to be coming faster. Wikipedia went from a complement to Brittanica/Encarta to CNN/Fox News. It really is collaborative development of information with a lower barrier of entry when compared to open source code. Of course, with this comes a lack of fact-checking and a caveat emptor to the users. Even Wikipedia itself is adamant about not being cited as an official source. It reminds me of the difference between unsupported software and releases where companies stand behind it (not just talking about Microsoft, but companies like Red Hat as well). When I fiddle around with writing code, I am incredibly appreciative of some of the freeware or open source apps I use for writing better code. But if I run into a problem, I don't get upset with the authors. On the other hand, when Visual Studio doesn't work as promised, I do because the expectation is there as they are a company standing behind a product I paid for (well, I get it for free, but you know what I mean :) ). There's a place for both classes of applications. I am appreciative of open source tools, but if I am counting on something, then I should be willing to drop the $$. Of course, getting information on a random topic so that you look smart when the time comes for barroom trivia is a lot less critical than keeping an enterprise website up, so I think Wikipedia has less to be concerned about. Still, it's nice to know that they don't see their usefulness as a means to usurp all other sources of information, but rather serve as an incredibly effective utility that helps people achieve their goals. Coexistence can occur, whether we are talking about software or sources of information. To those that update the site with insightful information as well as those who write the freeware or open source apps that I have used, my hats off to you. You give community a good name...

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.

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.