About Sprague WebLog

Welcome to my MSDN Blog.

I am a Senior Director of Marketing in the MSR Incubation team, and much of what you’ll see here is relevant to anyone interested in language and communication, including VOIP, speech recognition, natural languages, and more. Since this is not an official group-sponsored blog, I also write generally about other things that interest me, including natural language technology, mobile/consumer products, working and managing people, and more.

I have been a Microsoft employee since the start-up where I used to work, WebTV Networks, was acquired in 1997.  WebTV slowly reorganized into Microsoft TV, and I was in charge of the professional services group there (we called it “Deployment Engineering”) until I decided to leave Silicon Valley and move here to Redmond in early 2004.

Before Microsoft, I ran the evangelism team at Apple Computer in Japan, where I lived for 7 years in the late 80s and 90s. I have an MBA from Wharton U-Penn and an undergrad degree in Computational Linguistics from Stanford.

You can find more about me at http://www.richardsprague.com, which includes contact information and pointers to my other non-Microsoft blogs and ideas.