learning — Scobleizer

A conversation with Windows Vista Kernel Team

December 23, 2005 By

This is Channel 9′s Christmas Present to geeks everywhere. A candid conversation with the team that’s building Windows Vista’s kernel. I even ask if they wish the registry had never been invented. But, Charles Torre did most of the interviewing. Being in a room with these guys for an hour makes my brain hurt.

They give a lot of details about how they are rearchitecting Windows to make it easier to ship new, higher-quality, versions of the OS.

I don’t remember any conference where these four people get together and just have a simple conversation. In 2006 I’m going to push for even more corporate transparency into why we do the things we do. Since much of the world has bet on our products, shouldn’t the world have better conversations with the folks who build those products?

Think about the impact on the world these four people have. If there are going to be hundreds of millions of people using Windows Vista (and that’s if it’s a market failure), and these four people find a way to increase computer speeds even a few seconds a day (or do something similarly impressive to increase productivity), imagine the economic impact of that.

Happy Holidays from building 18 on Microsoft’s headquarters! Hope you have a good one!

Update, I wish I were back in Belgium with this Nine Guy.

Filed Under: Chat, learning, Microsoft Office, streaming

#29: I gave Douglas Engelbart a mouse and a book

November 14, 2005 By

Tonight I peered into the eyes of the creator.

And heard his frustration.

It all started earlier this afternoon when Buzz Bruggeman asked me in an email “want to have dinner with Douglas Engelbart?”

First of all, if you don’t know who Douglas Engelbart is you better do some reading. He invented the mouse and many of the concepts that you are now using to read my words. And he did that 40 years ago. Yes, he was that far ahead.

Oh, Buzz, do you have to ask?

Anyway, turned out he had been talking with Bill Daul, one of Doug’s friends and they quickly arranged a dinner. Six people in total. Andy Ruff, program manager on Microsoft’s Entourage team. Buzz. Doug’s friend Bill. I had a previously arranged dinner with Joseph Jaffe, so I invited him along.

What an incredible dinner. The five of us hung on every word Doug spoke. The conversation was interesting and diverse.

I filmed part of it but the restaurant was so noisy that that probably won’t be very useful.

Some key things stuck with me.

1) Doug is a frustrated inventor. He was frustrated over and over again during his career by people who just didn’t get his ideas.
2) He says he has many ideas that he hasn’t shared yet. We talked about the way the system could change from how it sees what you’re paying attention to, for instance.
3) He repeated for us the creation of the mouse. Said they still don’t know who came up with the name “mouse.” That was the part of the dinner I filmed.
4) He challenged the business people at the table (specifically looking at Andy and me) to come up with a way to increase the speed that innovations get used. He didn’t say it, but his eyes told me that taking 25 years for the world to get the mouse was too long and his career would have been a lot more interesting if people could have gotten his ideas quicker. I told him that ideas move around the world a lot faster now due to blogs and video (imagine trying to explain what Halo 2 was going to look like if all you had to describe it was ASCII text).

It was an incredible evening. One that I just can’t do justice to by writing on my blog. I got to say thank you to a real visionary who plowed forward even after everyone had told him he was nuts.

I handed him a pre-release copy of our book, wrote in the front “thank you for inventing the world that made all of this possible” and gave him the mouse that I used. Hey, he gave all of us mice, seemed to be the least I could do.

Joseph Jaffe just posted about the night. Thanks Joseph for the kind words, your ideas on the new world of marketing are inspiring.

But peering into the eyes of the creator I realized something. He’s also the best evangelist I’ve ever met. He can draw pictures and inspire in a way that few people can. And, this 80-year-old can run intellectual circles around most 25-year-olds I’ve met (and certainly runs circles around me). He’s an amazing person and certainly an American treasure.

Filed Under: Geeks, IBM, learning

#17: How do you create happy programmers?

November 13, 2005 By

Kathy Sierra links to an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, of 37 Signals, which talks about making programmers happy.

I’ve been studying that for quite a while. I remember back in the 1980s a programmer came into the camera store and was talking to me. He was down on his company (which won’t go named here but it wasn’t GYM). I asked him why he was bummed. He said his company had killed his last few projects. I still remember what he said to me “I am an engineer and I want to work somewhere that puts my work into the hands of customers.”

The guys who stare at a blank black or white screen and start typing and start creating the things we all find magical just want us to see their work in our hands. Is it more complicated than that?

Yeah, it is.

They also want a workplace where merit rules the day and discrimination is not a word that’s heard. They want good tools (you watch a developer’s eyes light up when you setup a high-end computer with dual-screen high res monitors).

Since there’s a lot of developers and their managers who read here, what else do you find makes for happy programmers?

Filed Under: Blog Tips, entrepreneurs, learning

Dave Winer posts full text of Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie’s memo

November 8, 2005 By

Just saw that Dave Winer just posted the full text of Bill Gates’ “birthday memo/email” and Ray Ozzie’s memo/email to the company.

These memos are two more reasons why I enjoy working at Microsoft.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, entrepreneurs, learning, Microsoft Office

InfoWorld writes: Microsoft is stuck on the C: drive

November 8, 2005 By

Ephraim Schwartz writes that despite its new service offerings, Redmond will have a hard time transitioning from the desktop software model.

Actually, he was a bit more direct than that: Something is rotten in Redmond, he wrote.

Now, I have a choice. Do I respond with denials? Or say nothing? Or agree with him?

Now, I’m sure the PR types would say “keep your mouth shut.” Heck, that’s what our competitors do. Read this blogger’s (he works at Apple) post who agreed to do an interview, but then pulled out, probably due to pressure from PR folks or others inside Apple.

There’s really no winning with responding to Ephraim. Not at this point in time anyway. Why? If I agreed then I’d be telling people something that isn’t true. We are undergoing change internally. If I disagreed then I’d be forced to put up some examples of why Ephraim isn’t right and I don’t have enough examples right now.

I keep going back to a Photo Marketing Show where I was sitting in Kodak’s booth in 1989. They had just announced some of the first digital products. It was clear they were being disrupted. They had no clue that over the next 15 years their industry would totally change from a chemical-based one to a digital one (they really didn’t, you should have seen how clueless their salespeople were about digital and the changes that were going to roil over them).

I keep thinking about that. I was actually trying to help them see the new world and they kicked me out of their booth (really, they did, they wanted to control the message and didn’t want some college kid showing that he knew more about their new printers than they did). I never forgot that.

So, what’s the right answer? Listen to the college kids! They have more of the answers than we do anyway.

It’s why I’m on Matt Mullenweg’s blogging service. It’s why I’m using Flock. Why I’m trying out Kevin Burton’s new service.

And, I assume that radical and deep changes are coming to our industry and that these forces can’t be stopped. So, might as well ride the wave and go with it.

Anyway, what would you do if you were Bill Gates and you saw the changes that are hitting our industry?

Filed Under: Blog Tips, learning, Microsoft Office

Liz notices a bit of sexism in reporting about Mind Camp

November 6, 2005 By

Liz Lawley, on misbehaving, notices that women in technology aren’t being given a good rep in media reports and that to get more women participating in the tech field we need more positive representations of the women who are already here and takes on a Seattle PI reporter who quoted Tara Hunt. Update: I fixed this paragraph to properly reflect the right publication.

Tara and Liz are both gifted with far more intellectual horsepower than I am. Tara is starting up her own company (actually she’s doing marketing for Riya, not quite starting it up herself) and Liz teaches college and is on sabattical working with Microsoft Research and Microsoft Search.

John’s blog post does seem to present a one-sided view of Tara, as she points out on her blog. She’s very impressive (I’ve talked with her several times) and her company and product (Riya) are getting lots of attention. I had lengthy conversations with both Liz and Tara yesterday and came away from both thinking “I wish I were smart like them.”

But, this is what’s great about blogs. If someone provides only one side of the story, others can provide more.

Update: John replied on his original blog post as to what his intention was.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, learning