Correcting the Record about Microsoft

I'm seeing some things on the blogs that just chap my hide.

First, I love Microsoft and Microsoft did not lose me — at least as a supporter and friend. I am not throwing away my Tablet PC or my Xbox or my other Microsoft stuff. :-)

Second, my management team is awesome and I don't have a beef with them at all. They have ALWAYS supported me. I have, in my pocket, a corporate American Express card and they never have questioned any of my expenses. The reason I shared rooms with other bloggers is because I always treated Microsoft as a startup. I don't believe it's proper to waste shareholder resources if you don't need to.

Third, I wasn't, and am not, frustrated at Microsoft. I've never had more opportunities available to me. In fact, I am due to spend a day with ImagineCup contestants and Bill Gates later this month.

Fourth, believe it or not, but no one at Microsoft has complained to me about my views for a very long time. In fact, the harsher I got the more support I got. Friday I visited with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Management at Microsoft didn't say a thing about that. Imagine if your employees went to your fiercest competitor and had a very public lunch, wouldn't you be up in arms? Not at Microsoft. At Microsoft I am encouraged to change the world and make things better for our customers.

Fifth, I've never been told not to travel to any conference by anyone at Microsoft and my travel expenses were always approved. I was encouraged to meet with developers wherever they lived. And, it is my job to go around to Microsoft offices worldwide and interview employees about the technologies they are building. At many conferences, where I was speaking about non-Microsoft stuff, I didn't feel it was appropriate to charge our shareholders for those expenses. That was my decision, not my boss's.

Sixth, how do you know that the company didn't move heaven and hell to keep me happy? They did. I have the best job in the tech world. Bar none. I got to meet and interview and influence the best people in the world. Career decisions are personal and opportunity and growth require thinking about a lot of different things, not just one or two. I've turned down quite a few offers for more money than I'm now making.

Seventh, there is a lot more positive PR to come out of my mouth about Microsoft. It is the best big company in the world (and I've been lucky to meet and study quite a few of the world's best companies lately).

Eighth, I'm not the only blogger at Microsoft. There are about 3,000 of them here. They are not having the plug pulled on them. They changed the world. I just was the cheerleader.

So, what about the other news? This is a rapidly-evolving part of my life. I just made this decision and it got out before I was completely ready to talk about it. I invite you to meet with me at the VLoggerCon tomorrow evening at 3 to 6 p.m. in San Francisco where we'll talk about it further (and I'll post again tomorrow about what's going on in my life and why I made this decision).

Oh, and thanks Niall Kennedy for your post. I really appreciate your friendship and am so glad you're at Microsoft.

Chris Pirillo doesn’t get Second Life (and gives us Windows Vista stats)

Chris Pirillo doesn't get Second Life. That's OK, he doesn't get baseball either. I thought Chris' avatar with a bottle sticking out of his head was pretty funny, though. Maybe Chris, all you need to do is hold Eric Rice's hand. Heck, it worked for me. Heheh.

Here's a little secret Chris: Second Life IS lame. Why? Cause the people in Second Life are the ones who built it. Think about that one for a while. Maybe if it's lame you just haven't built something not lame yet.

Actually, we should all just blame this guy, he's a developer at Linden Labs. I forget his name and his card is back at work. I think he's the guy responsible for what my son told me on Thursday "hey, Dad, I got you some waving PRIMs." You know you're getting old when you have to ask your kid "what the heck did you just say?"

But, on the other hand, Chris did do some real reporting (imagine a blogger doing THAT!) and found out that our download servers and Internet links are overloaded thanks to Windows Vista. The Windows Vista team blog has more on that. Oh, that's right, no one cares about good old Microsoft anymore or its lame OS. Heheh.

In other Microsoft news we renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0. 3.0 is always the one that rocks, isn't it?

Oh, and our identity guru, Kim Cameron says he likes the new Cardspace name too, for what used to be called InfoCards. Anyway, now I'm really leaving to go to VLoggerCon. More from the road.

John Dvorak explains how he tweaks Mac users for traffic

Last night after being on "This Week in Tech" (#1 tech podcast with about 250,000 downloads a week) we were standing around and John Dvorak came up to me and said hi and thanks for being on the show. I told him I admired how he gets people to link to him by pissing off vast groups (this week he had all the VLoggers up in arms cause he was being his cantankerous old self and telling vloggers that vlogs are crap). Anyway, he started explaining how he plays the Mac audience. Dave Winer, who was also part of the conversation, said "hold on, I wanna get this on video." John didn't object and this video is the result. Destined to be an internet classic. Already Dugg 500+ times. Of course now he gets even more traffic just talking about it. The guy is a numbers-generating genious! I remember about seven years ago Patrick and I were visiting TechTV thanks to Leo Laporte's invitation and we met John in the hall and he told my son "the secret to life is to get the camera to pay attention to you." Or something like that. John said last night he didn't remember saying that, but that he'd take credit for it anyway. Heheh.

Well, I'm off to go to VLoggerCon. Oh, last night I met the guy, Kent Nichols, who does "Ask a Ninja." That guy is funny. He's holding the microphone here on TWiT.

Visiting Sun’s CEO

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just dropped me off at the lobby of building 10. So, I'm sitting on the floor near a power outlet and am blogging my experiences.

What an enjoyable guy! We walked across the street to a Togos sandwich shop. Little-known trivia, Togos was started by a couple of San Jose State University students. I have lots of great memories of eating in Togos over the years (there was one across the street from our high school — I graduated in 1983).

Anyway, at one point we were having such an engaged conversation I had to remind myself that he runs a company with 37,000 employees and billions in revenues. We instantly were talking like long-lost friends.

There was a serious tone to our lunch, though, we talked a lot about the business difficulties facing Sun Microsystems. They are about to layoff thousands of people.

One thing I look for in leaders, though, is willingness to take the worst of times in stride with a clear eye on what comes next. Jonathan exceeded all my ideas of what a leader should do. And he has great pride in Sun, too, and says that the business is starting to turn around.

For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun's dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that'll get posted by workers who've just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It'll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There's a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

At one point I asked him about the Business Week cover I saw (Marissa Mayer at Google was staring at both of us, being crowned by BusinessWeek as queen of innovators) and said "what innovations is Sun doing?" Later I asked him if there's something that Sun and Microsoft could innovate together on?

He told me about some of the innovations that Sun has been working on in the past few years. He's in the midst of a large-scale corporate upheaval and rebuilding.

One of the things he's proudest of is Sun's engineers found a way to dramatically lower the power consumption of their servers. How did they do that? By getting rid of things that Web servers don't need — and by slowing down the chip which didn't hurt Web performance, since most of what Web sites need is high throughput, not high turnaround time (he told me that I really care if 1,000 people can all download my blog at the same time, not that any one of those getting it a microsecond faster). He told me that they found that customers of the size of Ebay weren't using much floating point performance on its datacenters. So they removed that functionality, and other stuff. That saves power. Good for the environment, good for his customer's bottom lines, and good for Sun too.

He's deeply concerned about the amount of power that Internet sites are using. He says that for many Internet companies it's already one of their top three costs. Reduce power and heat on servers and you can save companies like Google or Ebay or, even, WordPress, a lot of money.

How could Microsoft and Sun innovate together? That's a tough one cause our businesses are aimed at different places at the moment, but we brainstormed a few places and I'm sure we'll get something going offline. The fact that we were even talking about working together demonstrates that it's a new world and that the only constant in the business world is change.

He's most passionate about the growth of content around the world. Talked about how a friend of his showed him the popularity of Indian Cricket games world-wide, something that hasn't caught on here in Silicon Valley, but has up to a billion people interested around the world. That kind of content will be delivered over the Internet, which means more business opportunities for Sun. He sees the effect that blogs, Wikis, MySpace, podcasting, and video and videoblogging are having on the growth of the Internet too and is looking for ways that Sun could help those networks grow and thrive.

Why invite me over for lunch? Cause he is seeing the deep effect that blogging is having on his company (it's helping recruitment at Sun too, even in the face of layoffs) and wanted to meet me and get to know me a little better. That's very flattering, but I too was trying to learn something about Sun that hadn't been reported already.

One thing I found out? That he's a staunch proponent of working at home. At Sun they found that people who work at home are far less likely to leave Sun than employees that have to come into the office. He sees that as a competitive advantage and doesn't understand why some companies force their employees to come into the office.

He also went into great detail with me about why Sun is in the position of having to lay people off. I found that to be fascinating behavior on the behalf of a CEO meeting with an employee of one of his fiercest competitors. He's bummed out by having to lay people off which seems trite to say when you talk about a CEO that isn't seeing his own job threatened, but he told me he grew up in a poor family and wants to put Sun into a position so it can hire back all those workers.

He won me over. I've met a few CEOs over the years and a lot of them just want to tell me their point of view. Jonathan was noticeably different: he asked ME questions about how I looked at the world. He was curious, personable, someone I could see drinking a lot of beer with and still remaining friends with. And that's my point of view from the floor of Sun Microsystems' corporate headquarters.

Next time Jonathan, you gotta come up to Microsoft and I'll buy lunch and let's take the relationship further.

New “hot video” site opens

It's a day of meeting with CEOs. Just met with Rogelio Bernal Andreo for lunch. He's CEO of AR Networks, which produces elistas.net which has 20 million users, mostly in South America (it's an email mailing list system similar to Yahoo Groups).

But, that's not what we were talking about. Today VLoggerCon starts so Rogelio told me he had something to show me.

He had an itch. He loves the new videos that are coming out on Google Video, YouTube, and other video sites. But, each site is its own silo. They only show popular videos on their own site, not on others.

So he started looking around for a site that would let people around the world vote for their favorite videos. He ran across Digg and thought "why isn't there a Digg for video?" He couldn't find one, so he built one, called ZoomBlast.

Now, what's the problem? They don't have hundreds of thousands of people there like Digg does. But, video is getting more and more important, so I bet they start showing up soon.

What do you think? Where do you go to find the latest hot video?

Well, I'm off to meet with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Whew, what a day. Then tonight I'll be on TWiT with Leo Laporte and gang. Or something like that.

Why was Rogelio meeting with me? To show me his secret business plan and get my feedback. Looks pretty interesting Rogelio, you're definitely an entrepreneur to watch!

Download Windows Vista

Neowin is reporting that Windows Vista is now available for public download. Go get it!

Yeah, Pete Abilla, I've been writing about Microsoft about 50% of the time lately. (He analyzed my blog). Sorry about that. I'll try to make the percentage less, but there's just a lot of stuff coming through my email streams about Microsoft lately.

Update: Microsoft has a "Get Ready" page that might prove useful and CNET has an article.

Podcasting not a good name? Huh?

I see that Dave Winer and Seth Godin and Mark Ramsey are talking about the name "podcasting" again.

That's a great name! And I haven't heard anyone at Microsoft complain about it in more than eight months. Even before that I only heard one or two arguments like the one Mark is putting out, but one thing at Microsoft that I've noticed is that once someone makes a good case and a consensus is formed we don't go back and reargue stuff like this. Podcasting has stuck. No use debating that anymore.

Did you know we have a podcasting email alias internally at Microsoft? Yeah

We're slow to react to podcasting as a trend, yes. Shame on us for that. But don't believe it's because of the name. It's not (Dave claimed that's why we haven't done a lot of podcasting stuff yet). 

So, why hasn't podcasting taken off more yet? Easy! It's hard to discover new ones (you gotta listen to them).

You go to Podtech.net or Podshow.com and poke around. You have to download a file before you can listen. In that time you probably got bored and started watching Lost again. Or, even if you download something like "Dawn and Drew" you find out that they aren't interesting to you, and think all podcasts are sex talk.  If you're over at Podtech you might get lucky and hit one of their great interviews, but a lot of their stuff is commercial and not that interesting.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are some awesome podcasts out there. I like TWiT, for instance. And, generally anything that Doug Kaye does. And most of the PodTech.net stuff is worth listening to too. Of course there's the Gillmor Gang. 

Interesting that all of those are on the top podcast readout on Share Your OPML. Speaking of which, have you uploaded your OPML yet? Why not? 

Key network neutrality bill up for vote tomorrow

This is an important one to pay attention to. And that's no Microsoft hype.

We're expecting the U.S. House of Representitives will vote on the Markey-Boucher-Eschoo-Inslee network neutrality amendment tomorrow or Thursday.

I strongly support this amendment. It is gonna really be nasty if bandwidth companies can block or charge different rates to different internet players. It looks like Cox is blocking Craig's List, for instance. This is the kind of stuff we should expect if Network Neutrality isn't ensured.

Here's stories about Network Neutrality on Technorati and on Google News.

It's time to call your representative and let your wishes be heard.

What do you think? 

Google in China

Michael Parekh writes an interesting, albeit NOT politically correct, post on the decisions facing Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo and any other tech company that wants to do business in China).  Well worth reading. What do you think? What would you do if you were Bill Gates or Larry and Sergey?

Every product planner should read this

When I linked to Jonathan Schwartz yesterday I knew that I'd be taught something within 24 hours that'd make me smarter.

Nicole Simon did it.

She explained why products don't escape the echo chamber of the geek world. International differences.

What kinds of international differences are you seeing that keeps you from adopting technology? 

Email triage

For the past few days, in between "getting back in the office" meetings and some video shoots, I've been dealing with the mess that is my email. I still have 470 emails to go. Sorry for not getting back to you. 

Anyway, I've triaged them into separate folders and now am turning on ClearContext and am trying to get them worked down.

Here's my folders, which might get you some insight into the kinds of emails that I'm getting.

BBQ: (7 requests to attend my BBQ on July 2)
Blog News (179 things emailed to me to put on my blog — I only can get around to five or 10 a day lately, so this shows the liklihood that something that gets emailed to me will get here).
Channel 9 (52 items, mostly about videos coming up, a lot of asking what's up with existing videos, I'm way behind, also, anyone asking for a Channel 9 guy, those are being sent out)
Condolences (114 emails saying sorry about my mom. Richard Edelman donated $500 to the National Park Service in my mom's memory. That was very nice, thanks.)
Events (39 emails about various events that are coming up, lots of speaking requests that I have to mostly turn down).
Interviews (15 requests for interviews. Now I know why we have a PR team! Heheh.)
Microsoft Internal Requests (teams want various things, mostly want feedback on new stuff, there are so many new things coming soon that I can no longer keep track of all of them).
Requests (29 general requests for me to track down info or help with a problem.)
Tech Support (14 emails asking for tech support with a Microsoft product or service that I need to figure out who to email to).

Whew, lots of emails. I'm very tempted to select all and delete. But I won't. It might take me a while to get back to these, though. While I typed this three more emails came in.

How do you deal with email when you come back from vacation? Anyone come back and have more than 1,000 waiting (which is what would have happened if I hadn't done some email work when I was out of the office with my mom in Montana)? 

Anyone have any good tips? Yeah, I'm using ClearContext too, but it only helps you get started, it doesn't answer the email for you.

By the way, thankfully I have Outlook 2007. There's something about using it that makes dealing with email a lot faster. I'm still trying to figure it out, but whenever I'm back on Outlook 2003 I feel slow. For one thing the search rocks. For another the UI is a lot nicer to use. But maybe that's just me. Anyone else noticing the same thing? 

Off to VLoggerCon

Tomorrow my son is graduating from elementary school. Heading to seventh grade. Damn, the years go so fast. I'm so proud of him, though, you should have seen his country report. It was a work of art! Thanks to Dave Winer, who bought him an iBook for his birthday, he got an A++ on that and, rumor has it, scored all A's.

Hope that all continues. I think back on my Junior High time back at Hyde Jr. High in Cupertino. I was there when that school uncrated its first Apple II. Yeah, with a cassette tape drive! Wheeeee, was that a lot of fun. I think that's gonna be my equivilent of "I trudged to school 10 miles in the good old days through foot-deep snow" kind of stories we used to hear from our parents and their friends as they tried to tell us how easy our lives were. Patrick will never know the joy of loading stuff into memory off of tape. He takes having Wifi for granted. I wonder what his world will be like when he's 41. "Hey, I remember the good old days when we only have 10mbit wireless and it was only at Starbucks or in our house."

Anyway, after the ceremonies with Patrick, I'm off to VLoggerCon. Damn, it sold out (there were 100 tickets available three days ago).  

I can't wait to meet Eric Rice again. He's doing a "HipCast" of the conference in Second Life, details here. I think we'll test the scalability of Linden Labs' server architecture, that's for sure. If you're there, let's get together make stupid faces at each other's videocams.

eBay Buys Into Blogging

Alan Lewis, developer evangelist who works at eBay, sent me this one. EBay just opened customer blogs and converted their corporate newsletter to a blog format. Alan's blog is here and it is having its big developer conference this weekend too.

Oh, Christopher Coulter, please ignore. This is just more blog hype. :-) 

Blogs having dramatic effect on server market share

Check out Netcraft's June 2006 Web Server Survey. Key things? Dramatic increase in Internet size. Oh, and Windows gained large share numbers too. Why? Blogs, the report says.

Key quotes?

"The Internet experienced its strongest site growth ever last month, powered by a surge in blogs and free Web sites."

"Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%."

Who knew that blogs would change marketshare numbers?

Bing: Dave Winer did. He told me they would someday.

I just spent an hour with the Sharepoint 2007 team and they've added blogging, Edit This Page, RSS, and Wikis to Sharepoint (very well, I might add). At the end of the video I had them thank Dave Winer (he was the first to show me EditThisPage and RSS, both of which were featuers in UserLand's Manila, which I used, and later joined the company to sell) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of the Wiki).

Those two guys have changed the world.

The problem facing every tech company

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, blogs about the difficulty of getting people to see their new technology and programs.

I feel his pain.

When I was in Montana I met people who hadn't heard of blogs, podcasts, or Second Life (or even Windows Vista). You know, normal people. People who have other things to care about than what is on TechMeme.

Heck, today I spoke to a group of PR professionals and only 2 out of the 40 or so that were there watched TechMeme (they really should, since they are PR pros in the tech world).

So, if you were talking to Jonathan what ideas would you give him for reaching the unreachable masses?

Disclaimer: the other day Jonathan invited me to have lunch with him (thanks to Tim Bray). That'll happen soon. He's the first CEO of a major tech company to invite me to lunch. I am very honored and hope to learn a lot from one of the few CEOs who blog.

My tip? I'll ask him why he doesn't do a video blog ala a Channel 9. So many people come up to me and tell me Channel 9 changed how they viewed Microsoft that I know there's some real power in amateur, shaky-cam video.

I wonder if that team he spoke with (a Fortune 100 tech team) knew about Windows Communication Foundation or Windows Presentation Foundation, or what's in the latest Sharepoint, or what Microsoft Dynamics does? 

Windows more reliable than RedHat Linux? Yes, says Yankee Group

In the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey (not sponsored by Microsoft) they found that Windows 2003 Server led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual uptime.

Guess what's built starting with Windows 2003 Server's code base? That's right, Windows Vista.

Google’s achilles heel: search, er, Technorati

If I were in Bill Gates' office right now wondering how I'd deal with Google, one of my first proposals would be to take a deep look at why Technorati is succeeding in the marketplace on Google's home turf: search.

Technorati has taken quite a bit of my search time away from Google and Live.com.

Why is that? Well, Google has the same disease that Microsoft has: it can't see small things.

Blog search is a small thing.

Not enough users to get product managers at Microsoft or Google excited. Instead they look at the big audiences and the big money.

I can just hear Eric Schmidt at Google telling his troops: "let's go after Microsoft, cause that's where the money and users are."

And I can hear Bill Gates at our offices telling us "let's go after Search, cause that's where the money and the users are."

In the meantime Technorati is sticking its tongue out at both of us saying "you suckers, you can't see the small things and the small things are important."

Technorati is a proof case that Google is vulnerable on search.

Now, it's up to us to start seeing the small things. Give Dave Sifry a call. He'll show the way. Tom Foremski of ZDNet sees it. 

Google announces more sleepless nights ahead for MSFT product managers

Ahh, Google announces a spreadsheet service and the bloggers go nuts.

This is a good thing in my book.

Huh?

It's a good thing because of my philosophy. I want better software. Competition brings better software. It gets product managers to worry about customers. It causes discussions of features that were long-ago decided on.

You're watching two massively different ideas about how computers should be used battling it out right on the world's economic stage.

On one hand you have the old standard Office that says "load locally and use local resources."

On the other hand you have the new, fresh and clean, Google Office that says "load on the server and use a thin client, er browser."

I know which one I'm betting on. Why? Perspective. Even with my always-on-$80-a-month Verizon card getting to Network resources is still far slower than pulling them off of the hard drive. And, that'll remain true for a long time. Also, the Web browser simply doesn't have the API support to do really rich stuff.

Which predicts where Google and Microsoft will really battle it out: in the middleware.

Ahh, middleware 2.0 wars coming soon to a browser near you. Why? Cause as Google gets more people to try its spreadsheets more people will ask for more features. If they don't get those features the PR will turn back toward Microsoft's approach (since our Office has a lot more features than Google's offerings do). There will be pressure on at Google to add features but DHTML (er, Ajax) will simply run out of gas. So, you'll start seeing middleware coming down. (Runtimes like .NET, Flash, Java, and WPF, are what I'm thinking about — I'd bet that Google is working on a browser-runtime of its own that'll add a lot of local functionality to Web clients).

On the other hand, we're going to feel pressure to add online functionality to our Office suites. You're already seeing us respond to that pressure (Sharepoint added RSS, Blogging, and Wiki's in its next incarnations).

All this is great for customers because they'll have a lot more choices again. I agree with Don Dodge that right now there's a clear winner in this battle, but I'm not cocky enough to believe that Google won't figure this out long term. There are too many smart people over there for us to not take this threat seriously.

That said, I finally have switched to Windows Vista and Office 2007 on my main working machines and, wow, is Office 2007 getting underhyped. If I was a Microsoft product manager over on Office I'd send every blogger a free copy and say "please compare to Google Office." I'd love to see the blog hype if we did that.

Update: Dan Farber sees the two approaches as complimentary, not competitive. That's an interesting way to look at it too. Joe Wilcox is worried that Microsoft will get distracted by Google. Oh, I don't think we have to worry about that too much. I worry a lot more that both of our companies are missing the small things. Believe me, if the CTO of General Motors wants a feature in Excel, he or she will probably get it. Google can't distract us THAT much. But, what things are we missing? What are the opportunities that are bubbling up that we don't see?

Update 2: Vadivel Mohanakrishnan reminded me that there have been online spreadsheets for quite some time. Zohosheet has one, for instance. The thing is, I'm very unlikely to give even a big company my corporate data, but far far far less likely to give a small company that stuff. Why? What happens if they go out of business? That shows the market forces that'll bring most Web 2.0 apps into one of the big three companies.

Metaverse audio interviews now up

There's some really interesting audio interviews up from the Metaverse Roadmap Summit (which got a bunch of interesting people together to talk about the future of virtual worlds like Second Life). The Electric Sheep blog linked to this and explained the significance. You have to click on the questions, where you'll see the same question answered by dozens of different people.

There's also the Metaverse Sessions site, where you'll find an interview with me and my son, Patrick.

Howard’s nephew

Along my journey I've met some incredible people. Too many, if I really admit it to myself (557 emails are reminding me of that today). But, this evening I just started up Skype and Howard Greenstein told me about his nephew, named Sawyer, who is in a rehab hospital recovering from an unknown disease which has left him paralyzed. He's 12. Same age as my son.

He hasn't been able to move his legs for the past two weeks.

I can't even imagine going through that as a family. But, Howard is coping the same way I coped: turn to our global village and talk about it and try to start a meme to lift his nephew's spirits.

You might have remembered hearing Howard's name before. He ran the Twin Towers Fund, which raised millions of dollars in support for 9/11 victims.

Life is cruel sometimes. I'll go and take a picture and see if we can bring a smile to Sawyer's face.