- Marketing Jobs at Microsoft
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One of my favorite things about my job is the small, start-up feel to our organization and how I'm able to have the resources of a big company behind me, but with the flexibility and impact of a start-up. If you're interested in a job like that, please contact me, because my group is now hiring.
We have several jobs open, but in my marketing group I'm especially looking for people with an interest and passion for generating demand for a new product. We want to bring a new set of telephony devices to market, and we need people who can think creatively about how to get the word out, through marcom, PR, building new customer- and reseller-led communities, and more.
If you're the right kind of person, you probably either already have an MBA or have thought about getting one, but more importantly, you have ideas for how to turn a well-engineered product into a market success. If you have a background or interest in VOIP, IP PBX, small business telephony, or anything voice and consumer-related, give me a call. Our early reviews have been fantastic, so we know this has potential to be a real hit, and maybe you can help.
- Digital pen and paper
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Philipp Schmid, former API developer in the speech team (and my fellow Mercer Island resident), is now working at a Seattle company, Adapx, that's in the news today for their work on new new applications for digital pens and paper. The cool part of their software is that it allows you to use normal paper (with special codes printed on an ordinary printer), making it good for field work for scientists, firefighters, or others.
They also make a version that works well with OneNote.
- Speech macros are here
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I'm no longer in the SR group, but of course I still keep track of my friends there, and last week at lunch with the team I heard a bunch of updates. The most exciting one to publicly announce is the availability of speech macros. It's a free download for Vista that lets you automate just about any Vista task using voice. Rob Chambers (the new GPM for the speech team) started this project a couple years ago and I bet would have released it long ago except that it was so cool I think many of us hoped we could turn it into a full-blown product: you know, a box, a price, a business plan and all that stuff. Well, now I guess we'll have to rely on you to turn this into a business. Take a look at the macros, think of a great product you can build and go for it!
- Brainchild
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At work on Friday everyone was teasing me about the new posting by David Greenfield at ZDNet, which among many flattering comments about our new release, referred to Response Point as the "brainchild of senior director Richard Sprague, a former Apple engineer". David's a very fun guy to talk with -- full of lots of new ideas, up-to-speed on lots of the latest technologies -- and I really enjoyed my conversation with him a few months ago when he visited us. He's one of those rare technologists who understands that the distinction between enterprise and consumer is constantly changing, so I remember chatting about lots of fascinating ideas like the impact of Second Life on businesses.
Although I do wish RP had been my idea, the credit of course belongs to my boss, Xuedong Huang, who started the project three years ago. For what it's worth, at the time I didn't think it was a particularly good idea, and it took me two years to realize how wrong I was and finally join the team.
They say success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, so I guess it's good news if more people start taking the credit for Response Point.
- Snow showers in April
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Unbelievable what I saw as I left the office tonight:
This is the parking lot for our office, Building 99. Here it is, heading into late April and we are getting snow! It's not fair!
- Demo at Small Business Summit
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I live by the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. And today I reinforced the value of that motto during my "live" demo of Response Point, broadcast during the SB Summit web cast. I say "live" (in quotes) because although the demo was real, recorded in real time, and what you see is completely unedited, I had to take a few setup liberties in order to make the demo fit in the short amount of time available.
I arrived extra early for the broadcast, which was a good thing because at the last minute I discovered that I wasn't getting IP from the ethernet cable they brought to the stage! This was in spite of all the prep I did a week before, on site with the producers, making absolutely sure everything would be there. Since a live internet connection is an important requirement for showing off the coolest new feature of Response Point SP1 (VOIP service that doesn't require a phone line), this almost prevented the entire demo.
I still don't know what went wrong, but no matter: Boy Scouts always keep a backup, in this case, an extra DHCP router that would let me do a standalone demo if necessary. But my router wasn't working! Fortunately, even then I have a Plan B: yet another extra router in my car. Anyway, I managed to get the whole thing to work without much additional trouble.
I originally planned to do a true, "live" demo from start to finish, plopping unplugged phones onto an empty table and then setting up and provisioning everything in real time. But when we did the rehearsal it ended up taking way more time that was available, so at the last minute we changed it to have the system already plugged in and ready to go.
Even that, unfortunately, was too much for the time available. I had hoped to be able to show off the external calling experience -- dialing from my cell phone into the system -- but we just didn't get to that part before my host, Chris Cashman interrupted me to ask about pricing, which was my cue that we only had one minute remaining.
Anyway, take a look at the broadcast and let me know what you think. Although the demo was more condensed than I had hoped, hopefully you still get the sense of how quick and easy it is to set up a small business phone system with Response Point.
- Watch me at the Small Business Summit
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I'm doing a demo of Response Point tomorrow (Tuesday) March 24th at the SB Summit web cast.
It's free, and the easiest way to watch is to follow the streaming video on the SMB Community Blog site. Tune in between 10 and 11am (PST) on Tuesday morning, toward the last part of the hour, when I'll be doing a segment called "Phone it in".
update: Allen Miller just posted a downloadable version that you can watch any time.
- eComm tomorrow
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I'm looking forward to flying back to my hometown for the eComm event starting March 12th:
eComm™ is a brand new telecom event for those interested in radical innovation and seizing the next opportunity wave.
Keynotes include Google, Skype and Ribbit
My Treo's battery is on the fritz, so if I can get a replacement (or a new phone) by tomorrow hopefully I'll be able to blog while I'm there.
- My new (virtual) PC
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Wow, this is one of the coolest programs ever. The rest of you have been talking about Virtual PC and virtualization in general for a while now, but I finally had a chance to play with it for myself.
The virtual PC is a real PC, about as perfect a simulation as you can imagine. For example, it has its own MAC address, gets a unique IP address from the router, and can even share files over the network with the "host" PC. Obviously this means you get full internet access and all that goes with it.
What does it cost? It's free! Download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft's download site. Of course, to do anything interesting you'll need an OS and a bunch of applications, you'll need to buy Windows (or a Linux distribution) but you don't need to buy any hardware.
What's missing? USB emulation, so to do printing (for example) you need to use shared printing from another machine. To copy files from my USB drive, I first shared it from the host machine and that let me view everything from the virtual PC.
One tip: switch between the Virtual PC window and the "main" machine by pressing the right ALT key for operations , i.e. the ALT key on the right side of your keyboard--not the left one that I tend to use most often.
My next step is to figure out how to save a given Virtual PC image so I can copy it, back it up, hand it around to other people, etc.
- Happy to be owned by Microsoft
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Mike McCue, founder of Tellme is quoted in the Seattle P-I:
"We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before -- just a lot more of it," said McCue.
We had a nice offsite meeting with our Tellme friends last week and I can say the same thing. The Redmond people and the Silicon Valley people are working more together now than ever. Those of us who came here via the acquisition route have no regrets.
- Worldwide Telescope
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When I saw this for the first time last summer, I absolutely could not believe my eyes. Now it's finally been announced, at TED. You simply can't appreciate how cool this is without playing with it yourself, which you'll be able to do soon as a free download.
- Time to check out Office Live
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The New York Times publishes a nice review of the updated Office Live Small Business and it reminds me that one of these days I need to check this out again:
Office Live Small Business (O.L.S.B.) is a centralized Web site where you can set up all of those small-businessy things — a Web site, an online ad campaign, e-mail promotions, in-company communications — all by yourself, even if you’re not very technical. For the first time, these big-league tools are within your reach, partly because you don’t have to hire somebody to set them up and partly because many of them are free.
I admit I wasn't a huge fan of Office Live when it came out, but I know the people who work there, and they're smart: they know the limitations more than anyone and they're actively working to fix them. Looks like the NYTimes thinks they've succeeded.
- Random Acts of Love for Valentines
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A friend of mine is trying to get a new, non-profit charity off the ground with a service called Random Acts of Love. The idea is to give to the unfortunate instead of to your sweetheart on Valentines Day.
Check it out at http://blog.polka.com/
- OneNote Powertoys
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As a proud and daily user of OneNote, I was happy to see Terry Gold's summary of his favorite OneNote features. Well today Chuck Opperman reminded me to check out the latest OneNote powertoys, which add some even niftier features. While you're at it, check out Blake Handler's incredible list of all known Office 2007 add-ins.
My favorite is the OneNote Calendar, that shows a calendar view of all your notes. Very cool.
- Real-time transcription
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Alec Saunders wonders about Jeff Pulver's challenge to the internet communications community: why isn't there a good real-time captions application?
Answer: cuz it's super-hard (as I've discussed before). The legal and medical transcription businesses are huge, multi-billion dollar industries and if this were easy they'd have already adopted it. [side note: when you see those stickers on roadsides advertising you can make $300/day working at home, you know what that work is? voice transcription for medical or legal companies]
Incidentally, even some subsets of the problem are tough. For example, wouldn't it be nice if you could get an alert every time a live meeting mentions your name (or a keyword of interest to you)? That's doable, if you're willing to tolerate a certain number of false alarms. But the Holy Grail of where it can act just like a human is far harder than it looks.
Part of the problem is that when people say they want a transcription, they often mean they want a summary. Real-time speech is full of "um's" and "ah's" and repetitions that a human transcriber would ignore.
That said, I agree with Alec that it would be wonderful if this problem can be solved. Fortunately here at Microsoft we have plenty of very smart people thinking about it, and along the way we come up with some pretty nice solutions to other practical problems, like the concept recognition feature that's proving to be such a hit with RP.