Interesting, Vic Gundotra leaves Microsoft, Business 2.0 says, to take a year off and then head to Google.

Vic is the guy who hired me into Microsoft and is one of the people who made me believe. I will never forget his pitch to me to join Microsoft: “this might be good for your career.”

Thanks Vic for everything and good luck in your future career.

+++++

Brain drain at Microsoft?

Is there a brain drain going on at Microsoft? It sure looks that way but keep in mind that Vic and I didn’t write code. We didn’t make the products.

Those of us who — whether deserved or not — become public faces of companies can wildly change the perceptions of those companies.

There are 60,000+ people working at Microsoft. Not two or three. Or even 15.

What’s ironic is I met quite a few employees at Microsoft who used to work at Google. No one talks about them.

On the other hand, this is a win for Google and a loss for Microsoft. They got a good guy.

By the way, I tried to call Vic for several hours tonight to get his comment and he didn’t return my calls. I didn’t know either Vic was going to leave before today, either, although when we talked recently about my own career I could tell he was considering life changes as well.

One of the coolest things I ever got to do was tour the robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Here’s the tour unedited. Even gives props to Java and some non-Microsoft development tools. They have some of the coolest people I’ve ever met and the robotics might suprise you (two of the students were building soccer-playing robots on top of Segways, other students were building surgery tools, really great stuff).

This is a great video to run on my last day at Microsoft. Party in building 18 at 4 p.m. Patrick is here helping me clean out my office. I’m filled with emotion. Sadness. Excitement. Terror that I didn’t finish a bunch of stuff.

The video is long, but it’s in three or four distinct segments, so it’ll be easy to poke through it and find some good stuff. Don’t miss the soccer stuff at the end, those robots are mondo cool.

I got to know the 88Slide folks a little better at VLoggerCon. This blog is a little video trivia show (it’s only one minute long every day). You watch them every day, answer the question, and get entered into a lottery for winning a prize.

Anyway, Noah Bonnett, executive producer, tells me they are gonna give away a one-year’s subscription to Netflix on next Thursday’s show.

So, that got me all wound up, as if I’m not wound up enough (today is my last day at Microsoft) so I go over to the Beachwalks’ video blog to see what’s up. What’s Rox talking about? Money, money, money. Talking about Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation.

I can’t wait to do my own “walks on the beach” show — I’ll send it in to Rox for free. Rox has nicer beaches to play on with her dog.

I love the “Skype the Conch” button. Heheh. What a great lifestyle. Do you have a great lifestyle? Why don’t you share it all with us?

Oh, and if you think Videoblogging is just really lame, you gotta check out RabbitBites. Two rabbits rip various videobloggers into shreds. Hillarious!

Here’s the video interview I did with the Sharepoint team where they showed off their new RSS feeds, blogs, and wiki features (and something that Dave Winer first showed me as part of Manila, a feature called “edit this page”).

When I joined Microsoft three years ago I never thought I’d see this day. At the end of the video we thank Dave Winer and Ward Cunningham.

The addition of these things into Sharepoint led David Berlind, in part, today to wonder if RSS is the new intranet protocol?

Keep in mind that Sharepoint is used by TONS of enterprises. This represents a sizeable shift in how enterprises will communicate internally.

Interesting threads on an internal Microsoft alias today. Employees are questioning why we (Microsoft employees) can't just own up to the truth and stop spinning when we have bad news to report.

Yeah, we're talking about Charles Miller's post about the death of WinFS where he took Microsoft to task.

It's not human nature to admit that you tried to do something and failed at it.

And, it's very hard to share where failure's lessons will be applied in the future because that'd be tipping your hand to your competitors about what you're doing in the future.

What happened to WinFS?

The Web killed it. *
The Web is how people use computers now and will in the future. Steve Gillmor loves to say Office is dead. Well, that has yet to be seen (whether Office dies or not is in that team's hands) but WinFS was a technology that'd have a hard time getting going because it's anti Web. It'll be interesting to see if this stuff comes back in a Web way. Ray Ozzie to the rescue!

More on Memeorandum.

* Update: this is my theory. I don't really know why it was killed but when teams and companies don't come clean and give us some transparency into why things get done then people will make stuff up. And, it is interesting timing that this came a week after Bill Gates announced he was going to be less involved in Microsoft and went on summer vacation.

Update 2: Shishir Mehrotra of the WinFS team wrote me and other bloggers who are talking about this internally and said my theory is wrong and that WinFS hasn't died at all, but is actually being rolled into SQL Server and a new project that's under development.

Saturday started quite with a shock. Maryam called. She yelled into the phone "we got it!"

She didn't want me to blog it, she thinks it'll jinx it. But looks like we'll be headed toward Half Moon Bay if all the inspections work out. Got a great house there, albeit a bad commute, a HUGE mortgage, and typically gray skies. It's just down the street from the Ritz Carlton and the beach. We will definitely throw some fun events there.

Anyway, Ed Kaim (a former coworker at Microsoft) came up to me and Patrick while we were looking at books at Borders' books in Redmond. He said goodbye and good luck.

Our dentist said goodbye too.

It put me into a funky mood. Excited at what's coming, but sad for the loss of leaving a great community and great friends.

Yeah, this is my last week as a Microsoft employee and it's making me sad.

Well, that and Maryam just woke me up saying "the cleaners are coming, and we gotta do a ton tomorrow."

Sigh. Week of little blogging ahead.

Update: here's something I haven't heard about California Real Estate in a while: Maryam got it for $35,000 under the asking price! The house was on the market for five weeks. California's real estate market is showing signs of slowing down.

Seattle, on the other hand, is red hot. Our real estate guy, Stan Mackey (great agent and friend, by the way!) says our place in Bothell will sell within the first day or two and will most likely have multiple offers.

I just listened to the video blogging session at BloggerCon.

In the discussion it was clear that there is a coming conflict between people who "do it for love" and those who are doing video to build an audience, which presumably they are doing so that they can sell advertising or get sponsorship. In other words there are those who believe in production values and those who think that the production values advocates are missing the point: that everyday people can now use video to communicate in a new way.

It's interesting, but at Microsoft the Channel 9 team built an audience without doing much production. Very little editing. Very little enhancing of audio. Very little audio beyond just using the on-camera microphones. Most of my video was shot on cheapo cameras.

It's interesting that they didn't discuss why that worked: we're tired of committee-based marketing.

Look at a typical Superbowl Commercial. I'd bet that to do one of those requires at least three committees.

So what that my audio wasn't the ultimate 5-channel surround sound that the World Cup has? Or that my camera work is a bit shaky at times? I didn't do it to win an Emmy: I did it to get you a look inside Microsoft offices in a way that'd be impossible to do if we had "production values." 

Why? Production values require committees, or at least a lot of time and money. Committees generally strip the soul out of things. It's why we end up with names like "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005." Or worse.

Dave Winer made the point that by making it seem like you need to spend eight hours to do a few minutes of video that you're scaring off just the people who'll come up with something innovative. He said he doesn't do that and he has an audience of thousands who watch and listen to his various vlogs and podcasts.
That is so true.

Why do I like videoblogs? Cause I don't need to pitch a committee to get them distributed. That's a huge change.

Yeah, it means that there will be a ton of video that you won't want to watch. That's OK!

We have plenty of "professional" content out there. There's 150 channels on my Comcast and nothing is on.

Now I'll have 150,000 videoblogs a day to choose from. I'm sure that the really good ones will get pointed out.

I'm actually probably going to get two cameras: a cheap one and an expensive one. There's some content that just requires a better quality. But there's a whole lot of things that I'd like to do that doesn't require hours of sitting in front of an editor, or a $6,000 camcorder with a $600 tripod.

Speaking of which, the New York Times has a new blog that's tracking the new videoblogging world. Wow. I thought it'd be a year or two before NYT would jump in. Oh, and there's a good blog that shows how to do your own videoblog.

To get this back into a geeky bent, anyone have good videoblog tutorials that teach you how to program?

Seth Long writes that he just doesn't get HDTV and he's usually one of those crazy "early adopter" types.

Well, Seth, I see you're gonna be at Gnomedex. Jeff Clavier and a few other people are coming over to watch the World Cup games in the mornings. Come on over and watch them in HD and see if it still doesn't float your boat.

As for the price. Let's look at it a different way.

A few weekends ago I took Patrick to see Mission Impossible. Let's look at the costs of doing that.

1) Waiting in line for an hour. Cost? About $42 of my time (considering I got paid less than $100,000 a year). Every hour is opportunity cost that's gone.

2) Sitting through 25 minutes of advertising. Seriously.

3) $10 ticket to get in. $7 for Patrick. That's $17. Plus, $12 for a hot dog, Coke, popcorn. Whew. And I won't even count the exercise time to work that off. $29 to take just Patrick. Another $17 or so if Maryam comes along (she has a weakness for M&Ms). Not to mention that if you go to a movie you're far more likely to eat out. There goes another $40 to $100. More if a friend comes along. So, one movie can cost us more than $100!!

4) The movie itself. Cell phone went off behind us during the movie. They won't pause the movie while going to the bathroom. The teenagers talking behind us. The tall guy who goes to the bathroom in front of us during the movie. The sticky seats. You can't rewind the movie when your wife asks you "what did that guy say?"

Compare to the monthly cost of my video system: about $130 a month (you think I had $4k in my pocket? You must think I was one of those Microsoft millionaires. Heheh). We bought it at Best Buy and bought it on credit. Don't look at it as $4,000. Look at it as $130 a month (maybe $200, if you also need to buy a new audio system for surround sound).

So, for the cost of a few movies with Maryam, Patrick, and me, I get a humongous new TV screen that makes me the most popular guy with venture capitalists and interesting geeks during Gnomedex.

Heheh, by the way, now you know why Gnomedex's tag is "a higher resolution."

If you want in on the World Cup games, email me robertscoble@hotmail.com. First come, first served (you gotta have transportation since I live about 45 minutes away from Gnomedex).

Maryam just put down an offer on a house in Half Moon Bay. It's way too expensive. The commute sucks. But you'll all want to visit, believe me. Got an extra guest room and a cool sun room for doing video recordings. Walking distance to beach. And golfing. I don't golf. But, might have to take it up!

Anyway, that means we're putting our house up for sale next week. If you're looking to buy a house in the Seattle area, we should talk!

Oh, and I've been getting email about why I haven't changed my title tag yet. I'm a Microsoft employee until June 30th. Maryam and I join PodTech on July 5th.

My Microsoft.com email will work until Wednesday morning. After that there aren't any guarantees (my exit interview is on Wednesday afternoon).

For now it's safer to use my personal email address of robertscoble@hotmail.com.

I have a Podtech email already, but won't answer that until July 5, so let's use the Hotmail one for now.

We'll be working in both Silicon Valley and Seattle during July, not sure what our schedule will be yet, and then we're taking August off to relax a bit and get moved. 

Full time work at Podtech will start in September. 

Anything else I forgot?

Every big company employee should listen to "Users in Charge" from today's BloggerCon. Visit the MP3 downloads and click on "Users in Charge." Hear the anger? Good! Now are you gonna do something about it?

To the users: some people DO listen. They change the world. At Microsoft we got RSS, wikis, blogs into some of our biggest products (Sharepoint and Office).

The users can win! Especially with blogs.