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Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegiesFebruary 07 On 10 ... again!Another great video by Tina Wood from our latest mashup day ... including a chat with Marc McDonald, whose Channel 9 interview by Scoble is also a great watch. Thanks, Tina -- we'll try to have some chocolate chip ice cream next time :-)
jon February 05 Top 10 reasons people came to mashup day for the first time
“He” (pointing to his buddy) “came last time and so dragged both of us.” “We were talking about it at lunch.” “The Sweeney Ad Astra event was the best experience of my Microsoft career.” “We figured we’d come by for the demos.” “I just joined the CodePlex team and one of the things I’m going to be doing is working on Mashups” “We’re working together on the MiX mashups” “We met last week on rolling these out more broadly and I wanted to get a feel for what it is in person” “This is my roommate, he’s been to the first two.” “Following up on our meeting and thinking more about using these in recruiting” “It’s v3 so I figured it was time I checked it out.”
We rocked. More soon ... jon January 31 We're baaaaack!Apologies for disappearing for the last six weeks. Looks like we're still getting the hang of this blogging thing. Well, what can I say. We had a good Mashup Day in mid-December (I gave it a B) but some of the participants didn't have good experiences so we spent a lot of time getting their perspectives and (with the aid of several people far more skilled and knowledgeble than I at organizational development) reworking a lot of our processes to be more inclusive and encourage collaboration. Then we signed up to work with our friends in the Developer and Platform Evangelization (DPE) and the Live Developer Platform (dev.live.com ... hah, you thought I was going to say LDP, didn't you) groups on doing Mashup Days at the MVP Summit in Seattle in March, and at MiX in Las Vegas in April. w00t w00t ... but this is all happening very quickly, so we're all overloaded ramping up and trying to get new people involved while keeping momentum. Combine this with a windstorm in mid-December where a lot of the Seattle Area lost power (including the Microsoft campus for a day, my house in Bellevue for three days, and some of my colleagues for over a week), and two weeks completely detached from work for a much-needed vacation for me ... and then catching up when I got back while racing at full speed ... I didn't find any time to blog. Ah well. I'll try to do better, and to get other people as guest bloggers. We just got done with another Mashup Day (and it was *great* -- I gave it an A, with possibility of raising to an A+ with some post-event extra credit; details soon) so hopefully things will lighten up some; and in any case, I'll try to prioritize this. We shall see ... jon December 10 Very revealing headline ...Saul Hansell's New York Times piece about Microsoft's online strategy is well worth reading, and my attention was particularly caught by the headline: Looking for a Gambit to Win at Google's Game. One of the points I make internally is that we can't let ourselves be defined by our competition, so it's interesting and helpful to see such an explicit statement -- in America's newspaper of record -- framing things that way. jon December 06 A "Bill and Ray meeting"We spent an hour meeting with Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie yesterday talking about potential game-changing strategies and demoing some of the results from the first mashup day. w00t, w00t! Any kind of "BillG meeting" is always incredibly exciting, and doubly so when our designated corporate savior is there. I've been in a bunch of these meetings presenting static analysis tools PREfix and PREfast and software engineering more generally, but this is the first time it was ever "my meeting". And it went extremely well ... Bill seemed impressed by the demos, said he loved the mashup day idea, validated some of our assumptions, and poked some holes in our thinking. [The meeting when long, and Ray had to cut out before the end, and so I still need to catch up for feedback from him.] We're still figuring out just what we can and should talk about in our Space. There's obviously some things that can't be discussed for intellectual property or competitive reasons ... there clearly are some things that it's fine to discuss; for example ... Bill hadn't seen MsDewey before, and when I asked Ray to describe her* he thought for a second and said that she was undescribable. Since several of us are unabashed MsDewey fans, we wound up demoing her ... there was a nervous moment when Ahmad, who was at the keyboard, asked "what query should we type in?" We got one of the interludes where she was playing poker, which seemed to go on forever (Bill even commented "that's the slowest search query I've ever seen"), but certainly conveyed the idea real well. Bill immediately saw through the usability issues and prototype stage and got the potential connection to some work by Karen Fries, Tim Skelly, and others at Microsoft Research in the mid-90s. MsDewey is usually polarizing -- people love her or hate her -- and so we spent time talking about that as well. Hopefully I didn't give away any corporate secrets or expose Microsoft to any PR risk in that last paragraph :-) Anyhow, more soon-ish ... I've spent a lot of time the last week or so preparing for this meeting and so am somewhat behind on email -- plus there were a chunk of post-meeting followups. jon * yes, I know this is personifying a software program. MsDewey presents herself as a 'she', and so that's how I refer to her. |
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