Nighttime at Microsoft

March 7, 2006 By

Damn, things are busy here at Microsoft tonight. I’m hanging out with the first open source team at Microsoft (the WIX team). Here’s a photo I shot while we were eating pizza. I didn’t realize this, but they meet every week until late in the evening. They do this on their own time. Their installer technology is used by almost every team at Microsoft (and many, many companies outside Microsoft).

Across 520 Sanaz has a team working on shipping some new stuff for Live.com tonight. I’m heading over there soon to get a look.

I should do a video of all the things that happen at night here.

Filed Under: 1
  • This is just getting too depressing. Pizza delivery is decades behind in Europe. Could one of you unemployed guys please buy a bike, get a couple good American pizza recipes and start deliveries? I'd buy at least two a week, my son 5, each of his buddies 5-10. A fortune waiting for someone. And do improve those photos so I can see what's on your pizzas, while I wait.
  • Dmad
    what, exactly, do you know about Live.com that enables you to help? Or do they need someone to finish off the pizza?
  • J. Random Poster
    Jens,

    Sounds like Microsoft is finally adopting "truth in advertising".

    -jcr
  • Jens
    oops it did it again. Bug report please. if you do two left facing brackets it'll cut off everything written after them.

    Anyways, looks like scoble decided to just ignore my comment at #2, though international language research is important as one can see here.... ;-)
  • Jens
    oops, sorry the quoting doesn't quite work. It decided to cut everything off after
  • Jens
    >>The “WiX”-team?!? I strongly recommend doing some research before chosing abbreviations like that. I mean no German-speaking person will be able to keep a straight face when hearing that term.
  • This is just the coolest thing ever, I love seing stuff like this (the one with the IE team about RSS and that one with the tablet pc team) where you guys just hang out having pizza or coke, and talking. Imagine being able to hang around with people that are all interessted in the same things you are, they are the best at what they do and you can feed of eachothers ideas in making products used by an entire industry.

    To fun.
  • German
    The "WiX"-team?!? I strongly recommend doing some research before chosing abbreviations like that. I mean no German-speaking person will be able to keep a straight face when hearing that term. That's why the Commodore VIC-20 whas labeled VC-20 over here, oh well...
  • Oh, and I know the Toolbar team down in california was up pretty late.

    The WDS team certainly kept busy though.

    I'm used to staying late when I'm working on something really interesting (Which is pretty much ALL the time). But last night I just had more company than usual =)
  • Jake, dude, seriously. Don't diss the pizza with pineapple on it!
  • Jake
    I was concerned that you all had become tree hugging bike riding environmentalists seeking rainy depressing climes.

    Good to see there are a few manly men developing and deploying late at night and eating pizza. I hope that's pizza without pineapple on it.

    Take that Open Source Developers. Take that Google. Microsofties still represent.
  • Guzzard
    When I first read this post, I thought, Open Source Windows? Then I read further. But, I was thinking an Open Source or Free version of Windows, nothing fancy, just something that does basic things, like Email and Web, doesn't support applications, just Live.com or such things, sorta like an applicance, but installable on any machine.
  • bubba: our MS Office file formats ARE open now. Or, didn't ya hear?

    But, isn't it ironic that open source projects like MySQL rely on Microsoft developed technology? It MUST be evil!
  • bubba
    An open source Windows installer. Bobby, you guys must be so proud. Wake us when you guys release an OSS project that means something. Like say, MS Office file formats...
  • Ahh, cool, I should have brought pizza over. I'm still in 18. It's 1:21 a.m.
  • There are usually a few of us over here in RedWest on the late-night schedule.
  • Brandon, ahh, toolbar and desktop search teams working late too? Damn, what did we do, hire MarkL back? :-)
  • Sanaz' team wasn't the only one working late in RedWest!
  • I just tried the new version and the image section shows no images in IE7 beta2.. Works fine on IE6
    Please please make sure that this works in IE7 beta2
  • What I get paid for is doing videos on http://channel9.msdn.com.
  • I don't have a job. Jobs are things that you hate to do, but you get paid for.

    I love what I am doing.

    I'm sure not compensated to stay at the office from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. helping people out.
  • Is this your job? What is your job?
  • Paul, I just talked with Sanaz. They are in the middle of replicating the changes from one server over to their servers. Give it a few hours and it should get faster.

    And, yes, we're all still here in the office. Looks like it'll be an allnighter for the Live.com team since they are working on ramping up their infrastructure.

    Remember that Google has the same problems when starting up a new service too, if people find it too early (did anyone remember the little trick with Gmail of only handing out a few invites every hour so that they would make sure they didn't overwhelm their infrastructure?). Heck, my son stopped using Blogger because it was too slow and that's been up and running for years now.

    Give the team a day to shake the cobwebs from the system before judging the performance.
  • Arg. Live.com keeps getting slower and slower. I'm considering going back to start.com. The MSN team may have changed their name but they *still* haven't learned the Google lesson: Simple and Fast Wins!
  • Do publish a vid!
  • Doug, thanks! RobMen was the guy who invited me over. I think that's him with his back to me in the photo. You'll see him in the video I shot of the team.
  • Jens
    oh, and please don't make a video of /that/... ;-)
  • Jens
    Wix means "masturbate" in german. "The WiX team", made me chuckle... ;-)
  • MySQL and SugarCRM both use WiX to create their Windows installation packages. WiX is an awesome product. WiX's original creator Rob Mensching also has a great blog here (with full text feeds I might add Robert): http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/default.aspx
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