Josh Holmes has a great post about going the the mattresses to prove ROI for your application.  His post, “Moving From Cost center to Strategic Partnerâ€�, is well-written and is dead on the money. During my interview process at Microsoft, my interviews focused predominantly on two themes: ho...

What makes a person do what they do?  One thing we try to be at Microsoft (and another good attribute to have) is self-critical- to be able to objectively [to the best of our innate abilities,as it is hard to avoid some subjectivity in this domain] analyze our actions, our strengths, our weakne...

Love to see the great reactions to the Windows 7 beta.  I have been running the beta for about a month as my primary machine, and it seems incredibly stable given its beta status.  I LOVE the new taskbar, the window preview is even nicer than Vista’s (and I was pretty jazzed about that f...

you get stuck on this decision: is this work-related or personal? My work stuff ends up on my desk and my personal stuff ends up on my desk. No right or wrong. It just is. My work "to do" list sits on top of a flyer for a green cleaning service, which is on top of a list of the top SE Asian tech uni...

Microsoft has been holding the Imagine Cup annually for six years now. Here's how the event is described: Everything that the world may become "someday" lies in the hands of young people today. As they look at the road ahead, their close relationship with technology enables them to dream in ways we ...

Sez whom? I beg to differ. Scratch that, I don't beg. I just disagree. I've just never bought into the hype around the coolness factor of some of these other companies. Cool to me is that I can work from home, no set hours. Time for the gym during the day. I'm excited to do my job every day and love...

Could it really, really be? "We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there," Brooks said of Apple whose "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC," commercials criticize Windows Vista. "You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. W...

It's been a long time since I said my phone rocks... three years, in fact, since I actually liked my phone.  Today I bought a phone that made me want to share just how cool it is, the Verizon Wireless Samsung SCH-i760.  Despite the horrifically unmemorable name (nothing like "Chocolate"), ...

Last week I mentioned that about 40% of my time was taken by meetings. That's probably normal for a manager here at Microsoft and I don't see anything unusual about that number. But for a meeting to occur, at least two other items need to be present: other attendees, and a meeting room. Since most o...

Here's a cool Microsoft morale event. OK, serious geek points to the guy who likened pizza-making to dog-fooding. Yeah, we love our geeks around here; how can you not?   Also, I want that pizza oven in my backyard but they cost about $2K. And, you know, I said I was purging. But damn it if that...