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June 28, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 3

(If you're new to this thread, Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. Enjoy!)

• I woke up at 6:30 AM on Tuesday morning and felt ... great. I seemed to have put the jet lag behind me. It's always a good sign when you don't wake up and feel like your eyelids have 2-lb fishline anchors attached to them.
• One of the nice side-effects of traveling so many time zones away is getting a break from Microsoft e-mail madness. By the time I get to the Beijing office at 8, it's 5 PM in Redmond and the work day is pretty much over. Thus, I can pull out my MacBook, plug in to the network, and slurp down all of the previous day's e-mail traffic in one big gulp. This is incredibly nice: rather than being randomized during the work day with the continuous ping-ping-ping of new e-mail, I can take time, read a whole thread at length, and respond (where needed) with a little more thought. Once the mail's been dealt with, the rest of my work day is free for creative work. It's heavenly.
• (The dirty little secret of e-mail, I've found, is that many problems solve themselves when you're not looking.)
• For our Tuesday night outing, we did dinner and shopping at a local touristy hutong (as a point of reference, this place is the home of Plastered, the t-shirt place where I got my "Kung Pao Chicken" tee the previous year). There was a lot of pedestrian traffic, and the place was wall-to-wall with Westerners checking out the stores and each other. Our group walked the length of the district in a slow stroll, just enjoying the evening and marveling at the spectrum of goods and people that happened by us. It made me wish that we had more of these kinds of districts in Seattle; I'd certainly frequent them.
• A note on air quality: as you've undoubtedly heard, it's not great. We take our clean air in the US (and especially Seattle) for granted, and it isn't until you visit someplace with a serious pollution problem that you see how different things can be. Nighttime brings it out, too - as the dusk rolls in and the streetlights come online, you can see the air in the light beams, all the particulate matter swirling and churning and, ultimately, winding up in your lungs.
• (By the end of the week, a few of us had an ongoing tickle/irritation in the backs of our throats from all the gunk in the atmosphere.)
• Side note: most, if not all, of the streetlights I saw on the trip are using compact fluorescent bulbs.
• One thing not to miss in Beijing: foot massage. Brooke and I went for massage on our last trip, and had raved about it enough that the group wanted to give it a go on Wednesday night. We hit this swanky, gleaming, high-tech place - think Gene Juarez, but two or three notches higher. Ten of us are shuffled into one of the rooms, plopped down in reclining wicker chairs, and summarily have our feet dunked into wooden buckets that contain scalding hot water. After about 5 minutes of oohing and aahing and teeth-gritting, the pain receptors in the foot give up the ghost and in files this squad of masseuses who take their positions on small stools next to the feet of the recliners. They then proceed to spend the next 90 minutes warping, mangling, twisting, pulling and smacking (!) our feet into a substance resembling silly-putty, at which point they dunk said feet into a second wooden bucket of semi-warm water and smile kindly at us. During this process, I found myself twisting and writhing in my recliner, trying to remember to breathe and alternating between the feeling of "wow, that's great" and the unrelated feeling of "OH MY HOLY GOD PLEASE SAVE ME"
• (In all seriousness: it's fucking awesome.)
• "Lost In Translation" moment: after our feet were pulled from the scalding water (but before the crazy massage process), the group of us are trying to figure out what kind of entertainment we want shown on the room's oversized flatscreen TV. The entertainment catalog, the remote control, the TV and the people working in the room are all Chinese. The MacBU'ers, generally, are not, with the exception of our colleague Hao. Poor Hao is doing his best to translate for us about our options, and we finally settle on watching "The Dark Knight" ... only to note, as our feet are being pulled and pinched like taffy, that there is absolutely nothing relaxing about this movie. Each one of us us is getting more and more amped up, and we agree that it's got to stop. Hao steps in, we kill the movie, and then we try to find something mellow to listen to. The music selection is mostly Chinese pop standards and some classic American tunes - think Neil Diamond - at which point the cornball appeal of the English songs overwhelms all common sense and the MacBU'ers break into a spontaneous sing-along with whatever's on the stereo. (I swear I am not making this up.). We do a couple of rounds and get a resounding round of applause from our Chinese foot masters, all of whom are bemused beyond belief at how silly we are.
• (This really did happen. And it made perfect sense at the time.)
• Thursday was an all-day meeting for the Program Management team; we spent most of the morning in conference, and then took off and caught a boat to the Summer Palace. The weather wasn't very cooperative (gray and overcast and threatening to rain), but we did get a chance to walk the grounds, drink in the vibe, and snap a bunch of photos. It's experiences like this that remind me how young the United States really is.
• As the afternoon progresses, the weather gets worse, and eventually the small drops of water we'd been feeling for 20 minutes convert into a full-blown rain-out. Our group is near the north end of the Palace, so we head out the gates and see about grabbing a taxi. There's seven of us, and we quickly learn that the taxi situation isn't promising: the rain pretty much means that everyone wants a taxi; on top of that, we're in a part of the Palace where cars are discouraged and there are no parking or waiting spaces for taxis.
• There are, however, pedicabs.
• Pedicabs (or "Cycle Rickshaws") are basically bicycles with two back wheels and a passenger seat. They're everywhere in Beijing, and are generally one-man owner-operated businesses. You tell the guy where you want to go, he pedals, you pay. Pretty simple. They're not fast, sturdy, safe, or fashionable, but, at least at the moment, there's a half-dozen of them by the Summer Palace with tarps on the tops of their passenger sections.
• A bright idea is hatched: we will use the pedicabs to get to the nearest subway station ("very close", we're assured), at which point we will be able to easily meet up with the rest of MacBU for the evening's entertainment. Our Chinese colleagues quickly negotiate a deal with the pedicab guys, Yuan changes hands, and we're all split up into different vehicles. I have my own; other folks are doubled up. There's a lot of back-and-forth chatter that I don't understand, and then, suddenly, we're under way in the downpour.
• Things start off well enough - the pedicab moves at a fairly constant rate, and the guy pedaling clearly has Quads Of Steel to do this job all day long. We're hugging the right-hand side of the (narrow) road, and the occasional car zooms by with just a few inches of clearance. It occurs to me that I have zero protection in this thing - the cab is basically a cheap metal frame that's been attached to the bike, the rain protection is some tarps and plastic sheets that have been attached to the frame with twine, I'm sitting on a small bamboo mat that rests on the bare metal of the cab, and there's no gearing or anything to help the driver scoot out of danger if need be. It's about as bare-bones as it gets.
• The rain gets worse. It's coming down in sheets and buckets, and I'm watching the pedicab's wheels get increasingly covered in the water that's flowing down the street in a wide, flat river. I can no longer see or hear anyone else from MacBU; I send a couple of text messages to different colleagues, hear nothing. It's just me, the pedicab guy, the rain, and the roar of the now-increasing traffic next to us.
• The ride continues. It seems to be taking forever to get to the "nearby" subway and it suddenly dawns on me that I'm in the middle of some random part of Beijing, all alone, and completely incapable of communicating with the one guy who ostensibly knows where I need to be. I begin to wonder how this is going to end, and if I'm going to possess both my kidneys when it does.
• The pedicab makes an unexpected left, then a right, and suddenly we're thick in the middle of some very heavy traffic ... and I realize, in a flash, that we have a) entered a freeway of some kind, b) are going the wrong way down the one-way road, and c) because we're hugging the right curb, we are facing the fast lane. Trucks and buses are whooshing by us at 100km/hr, horns are honking like crazy, the displaced wind from oncoming traffic is shaking the pedicab, the rain is hammering us, the pedicab driver is as serene as a Hindu cow and meanwhile I'm about to have a full-on panic attack before, suddenly, it all becomes incredibly funny. (I think, at one point, actually giggled.)
• We bike this way for a good five minutes and then the driver decides to make a left-hand turn - across all five lanes of traffic - to get off at an exit. More horns, more crazy-fast drivers swerving around us. I'm so beyond caring at this point that I just try to snap good shots with my iPhone that I can share with Elaine, should I make it home.
• Two minutes later, we arrive. I've never been so happy to see a subway station in my entire life. A few of my team are already there, assure me that they, too, have seen their lives nearly end several times in the last half-hour, and the group of us huddles together under the subway shelter and keep vigil for the rest of our party, who arrive in dribs and drabs over the next ten minutes.
• It might be the stress talking, but the Beijing 10 line is the nicest, cleanest, sleekest, most modern, gorgeous subway on the planet. Really. I can't recommend you ride it more highly.
• The entertainment for the night is karaoke, and we're at a hip joint called Cashbox Party World. Beer is on the table when we arrive, and, after getting some food and a few pulls on the beer, we settle in for some serious (and seriously stress-relieving) singing. Everybody sang, and it didn't matter what - ABBA, Simom & Garfunkel, "Flashdance," Queen, you name it.
• And not that you asked, but: "Bizarre Love Triangle", "Mr. Brightside", "Hungry Like The Wolf", "1985" ... and Schwieb and I closed with "We Didn't Start The Fire".

All told, it was a hell of a day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 28, 2009 4:56 PM.
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June 15, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 2

(If you're just tuning in, Part 1 can be found here.)

• Given my late arrival and the wonders of jet lag, Sunday was pretty much lost. My trick with far-flung travel is to try and acclimate to the local clock as soon as possible, take the pain sooner instead of later. That said, the actual process of taking the pain routinely drops my IQ by a solid 30 points or so - I just feel slow, stupid, and thick. Hence: I hide out in the hotel.
• I've fallen in love with Skype. (Yes, I know I'm the last guy on Earth to use it.) After kicking 10 Euro into my SkypeOut account, I manage to reach Elaine on her cell through my MacBook. (Honestly, there's nothing nicer than hearing the voice of your wife when you're time-shifted by 15 hours.)
• Nifty Skype trick: set up an ad-hoc WiFi network in your hotel room, join it with your iPhone, and use Skype on your iPhone to call whoever you like. It's like the world's most high-tech cordless phone. If you're on a Mac (and you are, right?), just plug in to the hotel's Ethernet jack, open System Prefs, switch to the "Sharing" pane, and turn on Internet Sharing. Bingo! Instant DIY wireless network. Rock and roll.
• After dicking around all day, I go to bed at ~8 PM and proceed to sleep for 10+ hours. Glorious.
• Monday is the kickoff for a pretty busy week. There's a gaggle of MacBU'ers in town for the week, and, as is wont to happen with large groups, we're being managed and herded en masse. Our days are broken up into a variety of sessions and meetings and such, with regular breaks for lunch, tea, and so on. The evenings are generally dinner, entertainment, and a bit o' tourism. I glance at the schedule, notice how packed it is, and realize that any hope I'd had of getting ahead on a project or two is pretty much shot. It's 13-hour days, all the time.
• (On the other hand, they are taking us to karaoke on Thursday.)
• I am struck, as always, at how a Microsoft office is a Microsoft office is a Microsoft office. I've seen 'em in Redmond, California, London, Germany, China ... and they're all the same. Same basic desk/phone/chair aesthetic, same feel. It's comforting, in an "oh, hey, no problem, I can get my work done over here..." kind of way ... but it's also a little creepy.
• My coworkers start streaming in to the office. Everyone's got a good travel story, and a few have some really interesting swine flu anecdotes. Schwieb, for instance, had a guy on his flight with flu-like symptoms when they landed in Japan. The Japanese health squad marked all the seats five rows ahead of and behind the guy, held those passengers for advanced screening, and dismissed the rest of the plane. Yowza.
• We have Subway for lunch. Apart from the cheese (a little light on the lactose) and a few of the toppings (more veggies and pork than I'm used to), it's the same damn thing you'd get in the states.
• (Weirdly, I don't spot a single Subway restaurant for the entire rest of the trip. KFC, by contrast, is everywhere.)
• Monday-night dinner is at a pretty nice restaurant with an in-house variety show. There's a bit of Chinese opera, fan dances, a magic show. The magic show's kinda low-rent: the guy doing the magic is clearly still learning the ropes, and his bored female assistant came out in grungy street clothes (she wasn't listening to an iPod or chewing gum, thank God) to bring various props or hold this or that item. I felt a little bad for the guy.
• (By the way, I am now completely incapable of watching a magic show without hearing "The Final Countdown" in my head.)
• The evening entertainment did contain some AMAZING stuff, including a face-changing artist (totally incredible, must be seen in person), a hula-hoop master, some kung fu, and a balancing act (this tiny, 4' 11" woman manages to throw around a 400-lb pot with her feet).
• After dinner, we taxi over to the Olympic grounds to see the Bird's Nest, the Olympic Tower, and the Water Cube. The structures are incredible, of course, but what makes the night feel special is the wind, blowing and gusting, which brings out people flying kites (at 9 PM!), merchants selling kites (and Olympic tchotchkes), and people from all over the city just strolling and pointing and enjoying the mild weather.
• We subway home (and yes, it made my day). The government built a little, four-stop baby subway line (the 8) specifically to handle the Olympic traffic, and is now in the process of expanding it. It's totally modern, clean, and every bit as nice as any other major subway I've been on. It's on par with the 14 line in Paris: quiet, fast, and with glass walls separating the platform from the tracks (and keeping trash and debris from blowing down the tubes themselves).
• So there I am, waiting for the rest of the gang to get through subway security (all bags are x-rayed), when the 20-something security guard notices my "Kung Pao Chicken" t-shirt and immediately wants a picture. I'm flattered (I mean, I'm wearing it because the China team thinks it's hysterical), and agree. She asks me the same two questions everyone else does when they see the shirt: 1) "Do you know what that says?", followed by 2) "Can I get a picture with you?". This turns out to be something of a trend for the rest of the trip, and not just with me - one of my colleagues has long blond hair, which is also popular with photo-seeking locals. Crazy.

Back at the hotel, I drop into my bed, exhausted - and hopeful that I've paid my jet-lag taxes and can wake up reasonably refreshed (and time-zone-synched) in the morning.

(It's not gonna happen, but at least I've got 8 hours before I get the bad news.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2009 8:08 PM.
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June 7, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 1

My job took me to Beijing last year, which was cool enough at the time (Go to China? For work? Score!), but, as luck would have it, the plan calls for me to go back - and go back several times, in fact, over the balance of 2009.

Trip #1 happened during the last two weeks of May. As per usual, I took a few notes during the trip:

• The food at SeaTac is getting better. I've grown so accustomed to the traveler's standby (read: plastic wrapped sandwich) that I've come to subliminally associate airplanes with sad, flavorless and dry ham-and-cheese. However, I rolled the dice this time and tried this QDoba BBQ burrito thing that was damn tasty. Definite recommend.
• (The wisdom of trying a new food - and a burrito, no less - before getting on an airplane for 11 consecutive hours is a subject for another time.)
• The travel plan was the same trip as last time - take Northwest Airlines, fly from Seattle to Tokyo, and then on to Beijing. It's a long day. Unlike last time, I'm kicking it in coach instead of business class. It's not so bad - the food's good, and the seats even have electricity (sit north of Row 28, folks) - but the cramped seats really do get to you.
• As an aside, Northwest Air sells Skyy Vodka for $7. Depending on how badly you need to sleep, that's a smokin' deal.
• Just a quick plug for the laptop privacy screens: I have a PF15.4W from 3M, which fits perfectly on my 15" MacBook Pro. I bought one because I like to do my e-mail on the bus (or the plane), and I'm not so crazy about the guys to my right (and left) reading over my shoulder. The filter works like magic - once you're a few degrees off to the side, things get totally opaque. The one drawback is that you have to attach these janky little plastic tabs to the edges of your screen to keep the filter in place. (Steve Jobs would not approve.)
• Swine Flu Is Serious Business, Part 1: so we land in Japan and are told a) to remain in our seats, and b) that the Japanese Ministry of Health is coming aboard to do flu screening. Fine, I think, no big deal. Then the doors pop and about a dozen guys walk in wearing these blue Haz-Mat suits - the gloves, the face masks, the whole thing (think "Outbreak lite") - and wielding infrared thermometers. They then proceed to scan each and every one of us, and collect health questionnaires. The whole thing takes about 45 - 60 minutes, and, once we're let off the plane, we're all handed complimentary face masks as we tromp down the gangway.
• Roughly 70% of the people I see at Narita airport are wearing face masks.
• The connecting flight from Tokyo to Beijing was delayed from 7:15 PM to 10 PM (a consequence, I assume, of the Swine Flu screening), which is not, generally, the news you want to hear when you've been traveling for 13+ hours. I did what you're supposed to do in these cases, which is to go find something familiar and just ... chill. In Narita airport, that means McDonald's. Thank God for American consistency - that burger could have been served in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boise or New York. Exactly what I needed.
• So now it's an hour later, the burger's balled up at the bottom of my stomach, and I'm trying to keep myself awake and my attitude positive. All I can envision is Louis C.K.'s hysterical bit on Conan O'Brien ("Everything is amazing, nobody is happy") about air travel ("Delays? Really?"). It works.
• Apparently, Narita airport likes its WiFi like some people like their booze - on the down-low, in a quiet corner, and a little obscure. The good news is that there is a Boingo Wireless node in one of the concourses. Just do your best Egon Spengler impression: pull out your iPhone and walk around, refreshing the WiFi list. You'll get there.
• I slept - dozed, really - for most of the flight to Beijing. We touched down about 28 hours after I'd gotten up in Seattle the previous day. (It tried not to think about the fact that I still needed to get to the hotel.)
• Swine Flu Is Serious Business, Part 2: We land in China, taxi for-freakin'-ever to get to the gate, and are summarily informed that the Chinese Ministry of Health will be coming aboard to screen us for flu-like symptoms. The doors pop and these very chilled-out Chinese guys come aboard wearing button-down shirts, khakis, latex gloves and masks. (Compared to the Japanese, they're positively reckless.) They get the entire plane screened in 20 minutes and we're out the door, grabbing our bags, and walking toward customs. At one point, we turn down a long hall and see a "health inspection" station that we need to pass before we're allowed in to the country. The folks working the desk are very polite and businesslike ... and not terribly fast. It wasn't until I was through the screening and about 100 meters past the station that I realized the entire "inspection station" was being scanned by infrared cameras hooked up to digital temperature sensors. Every single person was being checked for body temperature while they stood at the station, and (I assume) the reason the inspectors were taking their time was to give the cameras a good chance to do their job.
• I later learn that if you've been in Mexico at all two weeks prior to your arrival in China, you will be a guest of the Chinese government for 7 days, no questions asked. They're terribly polite, but they're not screwing around, either.
• My iPhone works here. It's not really surprising - it worked last year - but it's still amazing, both from a "holy crap, the world is small" standpoint and from a "holy crap, tech standards are wonderful thing" standpoint. It's only after I get home that I see how much this technological freedom costs - $7.50 for 15 text messages, and $9.16 for four calls home. (Totally worth it, IMHO.)
• I finally arrive at the hotel registration desk at 2:45 AM, local time. I'm processed, handed a room card, and pointed in the direction of the elevators. I push "11", zip 110 feet into the air, slouch down the hall, and unlock my room. It's clean, and, for a guy who's been up for 30 hours straight, a sight for sore eyes. I unpack as little as I need to, and drop.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 7, 2009 9:17 PM.
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January 18, 2009

My Crazy Week In San Francisco

Macworld Expo was last week, which meant I spent the 4th through the 11th in beautiful (and sunny! and cold!) San Francisco working the show (and enjoying a bit of sightseeing toward the end of the week).

A few notes from the trip:

• Unlike my gig in Planning, Program Managers don't travel all that much, and it'd been a while since I'd spent time sitting at an airport gate. Turns out they're fantastic for getting caught up on a huge backlog of video podcasts (which may have built up while, say, the city of Seattle was buried under a blanket of snow).
• In addition to being a winged child-care center, Alaska 316 was a pretty bumpy ride. I'm generally relaxed about flying, but the plane was shuddering violently for protracted periods of time, and I found myself looking out the window, wondering if the damn wing was going to fall off.
• (Not to be too morbid, but it was one of those flights where I was glad I'd told Elaine I loved her before boarding.)
• After landing (safely!), I gathered my things, waited my turn, and exited the plane, only to be greeted by the overwhelming smell of bacon in the concourse. This is, I think, a good omen.
• Things That Make San Francisco Awesome, #4566: the mayor's first name is Gavin.
• The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system was expanded to the San Francisco Airport a few years ago, and I was excited to give it a try. BART's a bit different from other transit systems I've used. For starters, they don't use "zones" to determine fares (where travel inside one zone is one price, going between zones is another price, and so on). Rather, every BART stop has a table that lists all the stations, and shows you the price to get from your current station to your destination (in my case, it was $5.40 to get from SFO to downtown, one way). This is confusing and cumbersome.
• Second, BART tickets aren't single-use; they're stored-value, which means you buy a certain amount of credit from the machine, and the machine spits out a ticket with the credit encoded on it. Again, strange - it means you, the passenger, carry all the risk with the ticket. If you store your ticket too close to a magnet (or a cell phone!) which strips the encoding, well, you're out of luck. This wouldn't be so bad for a single-trip or day-use thing, but these are the same cheap cardboard tickets you get everywhere else (think "bake sale/raffle"), and they don't exactly hold up over time.
• Another note: when buying your ticket, the machine will want to sell you $20 of credit right off the bat. That's not such a hot deal if you're only using the system to get in and out of the city over the course of a week. Just buy what you need, when you need it.
• (Oh, and the damn machines don't take AmEx. Not so friendly for the business traveler.)
• The ride into the city was about as uneventful as you might imagine. Trains run every 15 minutes; the trip is almost exactly a half hour (we were under way at 7:42 PM; we arrived at my stop at 8:11 PM). Easy-peasy.
• (Reminder: Link Light Rail opens July 3 here in Seattle...)
• The Macworld people held a two-day "Power Tools" session on Monday and Tuesday, focused on helping people get more from their Macs. Microsoft agreed to participate, with Program Managers from each of the Mac Office applications giving a 60 - 90 minute talk about advanced or overlooked features. Stuart and I split the 90-minute Excel session on Monday afternoon, and it seemed to go fine - no major gaffes, no f-bombs from the podium, nothing caught fire. As I understand it, all the Power Tools sessions were videotaped and will be made available on YouTube sometime soon. I'll post a link when I get one.
• The big news from the Apple keynote on Tuesday was, to my mind, the end of Digital Rights Management in iTunes. The labels have, apparently, realized that DRM annoys legitimate customers, adds complexity to how people enjoy music, retards interoperability (and innovation), and, most damningly, doesn't do a thing to help stop piracy. They've finally hit stage 5. I never thought I'd see the day.
• (Since the announcement, I've dumped a good $50 stripping DRM from songs in my library, and will finish the process once Apple's entire back catalog is re-encoded.)
• Other keynote thoughts: the new iLife is incredible. I love the "Faces" stuff in iPhoto, but feel bad that Apple just shot FlickrExport in the head. iMovie, it seems, has long since abandoned any pretense of being an "entry level" application. I mean, yes, it's easy enough to use, but holy cow it's powerful. The stuff you can now do with the app - free with every Mac! - is astonishing. And finally, the new GarageBand is a classic example of what Apple does best. First, start with a great app. Then, identify the reason(s) people aren't using/can't use it (in this case, it's because people don't know how to play an instrument). Third, develop a slick system to teach people how to play, thus a) overcoming a market obstacle, and b) differentiating your offering from all of the other music apps out there. Finally, add a bit of sex appeal by having celebrity musicians teach you how to play the songs that made them famous. So cool.
• Overall, the Macworld show was much less trafficked than in previous years, seeming to run about at about 60% - 70% of last year's population. I wonder how much the down economy is driving this, or if enthusiasm is waning now that Apple isn't coming back.
• For all that, I love working the booth (the Excel kiosk, natch), and had some great conversations with people about Office, Excel, and Mac stuff at Microsoft generally. People are using Office 2008, and really like it - I was surprised at how sophisticated some of the questions were, and got some wonderful suggestions for ways we can improve future versions. Customers rock.
• Elaine flew down Wednesday night, so we could stay over a few extra days and enjoy a mini-vacation. (She was a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.)
• We decided to use San Francisco MUNI for sightseeing. MUNI has a solid bus system, but it's a bit arcane to get used to. Bus stop information, for example, is spray-painted on light poles, which I'm sure saves the city money but a) is hard to see unless you know what you're looking for, and b) even when you do see them, they look fake. Grr.
• Thank God for Google Transit on the iPhone. The new iPhone Maps application (with the 2.2 firmware) introduced "transit" directions, which meant we could simply enter our starting point and destination, and Maps would tell us which buses (or other rail systems to take). Awesome, awesome, awesome.
• Another good resource: NextMuni.com, which is much like MyBus.org here in Seattle. Just tell the system which stop you're at, and it'll let you know how soon the next bus will be along.
• Operationally, the buses seem safe and well-thought-out; I counted 5 video cameras on the bus itself; each bus also has a nice digital reader board next to the driver that lists the next upcoming stop. Seattle Metro could learn from this.
• San Francisco is a really wonderful city to see from a bus. Packed with people, vibrant, something interesting happening every 10 feet. You miss it when driving. Trust me.
• One of our stops was the Palace of Fine Arts. It's gorgeous at 4:30 PM - the light is perfect - and it's got a nice small lake and running path. With all the strollers, joggers, and birds, it's got the same general feel as Greenlake (only smaller).
• The cafe in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes a damn good omelette.
• Our friends Kim and Steve took us up to Twin Peaks (by Sutro Tower) for some amazing views of the city, followed by a trip to the new California Academy of Sciences. The Academy is a recently-rebuilt science museum, and it's just incredible - modern, smart, wonderful. We only got a few hours in the place, but it's the sort of thing that's genuinely don't-miss.
• (Oh, and the fish and chips in the cafe are really yummy.)
• Our hotel had a pretty good selection of cable TV channels, including two I don't watch a lot: CurrentTV and BBC America. Current is a lot like watching YouTube - it's all user-submitted content - and its sheer randomness (you never know what's coming next) is hypnotic (Exhibit A: "Internet Porn & You", which I kind of can't believe made it on television). BBC America, on the other hand, was running a lot of the new Dr. Who, and, again, I got sucked in.
• The flights home were simple, fast, and easy. Which made me think about the crazy-bumpy ride down, and the damn wing falling off all over again. Grr.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 18, 2009 10:45 AM.
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December 10, 2008

Some Simple Suggestions For Saner Spreadsheets

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

If you're like me, and spend a lot of time building spreadsheets to model or budget or crunch a set of numbers, you have probably had the following experience.

One day, you have a bright idea. You fire up Excel and begin working to express it. After hours and hours of constructing and tweaking and changing and modifying your spreadsheet, you find yourself sitting at your desk, brow sweaty, with a goofy look of happiness on your face - "Aha!" you think. "That's it! I've done it!"

You then save your work, quit Excel, and head off for a much-deserved snack.

Three months later, you remember your genius spreadsheet and want to update it. You locate the file on the drive, double-click, and ... find yourself staring at gobbledygook. The spreadsheet is, well, unreadable - you can't tell which cells do which, what math is being used where, and quickly find yourself starring in an episode of CSI: Excel, relying on clues, fingerprints and guesswork to determine what the heck is actually going on in your workbook.

This "unintelligible workbook" situation is not uncommon - and not even that surprising, if you think about it. Unlike the art of writing, where there are defined conventions (sentence structure, paragraph structure, document structure, story structure), spreadsheets are as varied as the minds that create them. On one hand, this is great - spreadsheets are fantastically flexible tools - but on the other it can lead to confusion, error, and misunderstanding. Without standards for what a spreadsheet "should" look like, the reader of a spreadsheet is often left scratching their head, wondering just what it is they're staring at.

(This by the way, is doubly true in large organizations, where some long-departed employee once built some hairball of a spreadsheet back at the dawn of the last Ice Age, and now your boss wants you to "update it a little bit". I've been there, and, well, good luck with that.)

Enter the concept of spreadsheet "best practices".

As spreadsheets become more integral to our work (and, consequently, more complex in their design and function), a clear need has emerged to have a set of principles around which spreadsheets are designed and developed. There are a number of distinct methodologies and approaches, such as FAST ("Flexible, Accurate, Structured, Transparent"), but in my view the important thing is to find a few guidelines that make sense for you (and the people you work with), and then ... just follow 'em.

My first personal experience with best practices came when I was in business school. My Quantitative Methods coursework was done entirely in Excel, and my professor, Dr. Hillier, insisted that people follow some guidelines when laying out their spreadsheets so he could understand what the students were doing. His guidelines were simple, straightforward, and made a lot of sense; years later, I find myself still using them and saving my sanity. (Dr. Hillier, incidentally, credits Duke University professor Dr. Robert Nau for inspiring him.)

Of the tips I've seen for sane spreadsheet design, the most valuable have been:

• Each cell does one thing, and one thing only. Any given cell on the spreadsheet should be responsible for doing exactly one thing, whether it holds data, calculates something, or merely provides visual space between other cells.
• Use intermediate steps. If a cell is doing one thing and one thing only, then you'll need to use intermediate steps to complete more elaborate calculations. That's OK - subtotals are your friend.
• Separate data from formulas. Formulas should always reference other cells on the worksheet for their input; they should never have hard numbers embedded in the formula itself.
• Use labels. Never let a number sit on a spreadsheet without a text label next to it that explains what it is or what it does. These labels will boost the "readability" of your spreadsheet, and help you spot errors.
• Use color. Use splashes of color to color-code certain cells on the spreadsheet. There's no hard-and-fast rule, here; I personally use blue for cells that contain facts that affect my model (think: tax rates, discounts or fees), yellow for cells that are considered inputs to my model, and orange for just one cell - the ultimate conclusion, or "answer" cell.
• Remember the "rule of thumb". As a rule, no formula should exceed about a thumb's worth of horizontal space on the spreadsheet. If it takes more, break it up. This will act as a forcing function to ensure you're using intermediate steps properly.
• Flow from top to bottom. Spreadsheets should read like the page of a book - start at the top and let the eye trace down the page to get more detail. The conclusion - the ending to the book - should be at the very bottom of the page. Your "reader" will know where to find it, and, if you've observed the other rules correctly, the build-up to your conclusion should be obvious and logical.

Now that we're armed with all these rules, I'll give a simple example of how we might use them.

Say your boss wants to throw a pizza party for the office and asks you to figure out what it will cost beforehand. There are 30 people in the building, so you fire up Excel and quickly build a model. It might look something like this:

Figure 1 - Pizza For 30 ... But How?

Let's go ahead and expand these cells to reveal their internal formulas (Excel has a nifty keyboard shortcut for doing this: hold down the CONTROL key and then tap the "tilde" key (~)).

Doing so will yield something like this:

Figure 2 - Pizza For 30 ... The Mystery Revealed

Wow, that's some crazy formula there in B4, huh? Let's see, I'm seeing the CEILING function, some addition and division and multiplication, a few numbers I don't know the origin of ... spaghetti, basically. There's a nearly 0% chance that anyone who didn't create this spreadsheet - create it recently - would be able to figure out what any of this means.

Let's try this same example, but following some of the tips from above. We might wind up with something that looks more like Figure 3 (Figure 4 shows the underlying math):

Figure 3 - Pizza for 30, Take 2

Figure 4 - Pizza For 30, Expanded View

Going back to our tips, a few things jump out:

• Each cell is doing one thing only. Some cells, like "Number of Attendees" (C4), contain just the number of attendees. Others, like "Sales tax" (C10) contain just one math function. Everything is nice and simple.
• We are using intermediate steps. We have a "pizza subtotal" at C9, and a full-blown total at C12. Both help us to see what steps we're taking as we proceed through the model.
• Data is separated from formulas. Every variable we're using - sales tax, the amount to tip, the number of people attending, the number of slices of pizza we think they'll eat, and so on - has its own cell. The formula cells crunch those numbers, but they rely on the visible information on the spreadsheet to do their work.
• Labels are present. Virtually every number on the spreadsheet has a label next to it that explains what it is. This dramatically improves the readability of the spreadsheet.
• Color is being used. As expected, we are using blue, yellow and orange. Blue cells are things that are assumed to be true about the model - the pizza place charges $15 per pizza, for example, or we get 8 slices per pizza (we are ordering mediums). Yellow affects those things that are under our control - like how much we tip, or how many people are coming. And orange is used for the grand total.
• We're following the "rule of thumb". The longest formula on the sheet (on cell C7) is no wider than my thumb, which means it's much easier for someone who's never heard of the CEILING function to understand what that cell is doing. (Incidentally, CEILING rounds up for us; on its own, the math says we'd need 11.25 pizzas. Since we can't order a quarter-pizza, we instead round up to the next whole pie.)
• We flow from top to bottom. We start with our assumptions up top, and then flow down through the spreadsheet until we hit our conclusion.

So that's it - some simple suggestions for saner spreadsheets. This might seem like a lot of work at first - it did to me, for sure - but, as a loyal and regular practitioner of these techniques for the past few years, I can only attest to my own happiness and productivity after having adopted them. Your mileage may vary, but the next time you open a spreadsheet and go, "What was I thinking?" you might do well to adopt a few of these habits.

If you're interested, my spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 10, 2008 10:11 AM.
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November 25, 2008

Going To MacWorld? Come Say Hi!

MacBU is gearing up for the annual pilgrimage to MacWorld Expo in January; a good chunk of the team will be in San Francisco for the entire week of the show, meeting customers, taking questions, and showing off our products.

In addition to working in the booth (which, truth be told, is a ton 'o fun), I'm participating in two public sessions:

• The two-day "Power Tools" session called, "Getting the most out of Office 2008 for Mac" (Monday and Tuesday), and
• A "Birds-of-a-Feather" called "Office For Mac: After Hours" on Wednesday, January 7 from 6:30 to 7:30 PM.

Both should be pretty interesting for productivity-minded Mac folks.

If you're attending the show, please swing by and say hello!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2008 10:09 AM.
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October 24, 2008

Under-Appreciated Excel Feature Of The Week: Goal Seek

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

Last month's post about Data Tables generated a surprising amount of e-mail from readers. Lots of people, it seems, are interested in learning how to get more out of Excel.

In that spirit, I thought I'd take some time to discuss and showcase a companion feature to Data Tables, called Goal Seek.
As I wrote about Data Tables:

Put plainly, Data Tables let you do "what if..." analyses in Excel. They let you see how the results of a formula change as its underlying variables change. Data Tables let you see an entire range of solutions, rather than just one single answer.

In that post, we explored Data Tables through the frame of taking out a large loan. The feature let us see how our monthly payment would vary if we changed the length of the loan or its interest rate. Our end product was a matrix of numbers that lets us see, clearly, how rates and terms affected our monthly payment.

However, there are a number of times when we're not looking for a table of results, but instead are concerned with optimizing around a single variable. For instance, if I go out to buy a car, I have a certain amount of money - say, $350 - that I can afford to put toward a payment each month. In cases like these, I'd much prefer not to look at a matrix - instead, I'd like to just know how much I can get for my money.

This is where you use Goal Seek.

Like Data Tables, Goal Seek lets you do "what if..." analysis, but it will solve for a specific, single answer. Here, I'm really only interested in one question: given that I have $350 a month to spend, how much car can I afford?

I'll walk through an example to show how it's done.

We first need to set up our spreadsheet. Just as we did with Data Tables, we will make a few assumptions about our loan. (If you want to grab the finished spreadsheet from the Data Tables exercise (download here), it will save you a bit of time.)

Just to plug in some numbers, let's assume that we're borrowing $25,000 for 4 years at 7% interest.  If we set up our spreadsheet as follows and use the Excel PMT function (=PMT(B4/12,B3*12,B2)), we will get a monthly payment of ... $598.66.

A payment of $598.66 is quite a bit more than the $350 I have to spend every month. So now it's time to figure out how much car I can actually afford.

Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Goal Seek..." (it's about 2/3 of the way down the list). The Goal seek dialog will appear:

There are three variables to worry about, here: set cell, to value, and by changing cell. The nice thing is that they work as a sentence:

In other words: you're asking Excel to change the value of cell Z until cell X is equal to some value, Y.

With that in mind, filling out Goal Seek is pretty easy. On our spreadsheet, we want to set cell B5 ("Monthly Payment") equal to the value of our monthly payment ($350). And we want Excel to do that by changing cell B2 ("Amount To Be Borrowed").

Setting Goal Seek to these values, we get:

It's worth noting that "to value" is set to minus 350 (-$350). This is because a monthly payment is a cash outflow - it's money you're giving away each month. This is how the Excel PMT function thinks about monthly payments, and, since we're relying on the PMT function to do all our heavy lifting in the math department, we need to make sure we're speaking a language the function understands. (It's a quirk, but an important one.)

Click OK, and Excel will crunch the numbers. Goal Seek will come back and let you know if it found a solution:

Click OK again, and this dialog will vanish. You'll find yourself back out at your workbook, which should now contain the answer to our question:

Looks like I can afford to borrow $14,616 for my new car  - which means I'm looking less at a new Mini Cooper, and more at a shiny Toyota Yaris. Pretty cool, huh?

So that's Goal Seek - yet another under-appreciated Excel feature. As you might imagine, it's a pretty powerful (and profoundly useful) tool. Personally, I use it all the time for situations like this (which seem to crop up in business pretty regularly).

If you'd like to see my spreadsheet, I've attached it to this post - just click here.

Best of luck!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 24, 2008 10:24 AM.
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August 3, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 8, 9, & 10

My last three days in Beijing were rather more subdued than the previous 7; following our sightseeing weekend, it was back to work on Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday being a (very long) travel day.

The remaining details:

• Monday was a shocking normal work day: wake up, brush, breakfast, walk to the office, unpack laptop, e-mail, an hour of creative work, meeting, e-mail, meeting, lunch, e-mail, snack, e-mail and then packing it up for dinner. The jet lag was largely behind me, so I wasn't fighting strange bouts of fatigue - in fact, the whole thing felt so overwhelming usual that it made me a little homesick. Rather than being a cool day in a new land, it was just another workday, but one where I wasn't going to see my girl at the end of it. It made me kind of sad.
• (On the other hand, I learned that acclimation takes, on average, five days.)
• Dinner was Schezuan with a gaggle of coworkers. They were eager to see how well Brooke and I would deal with super-spicy-hot food. We both love the stuff, and managed to navigate the sea of chili oil that came our way.
• Spicy food, apparently, knocks me out. Early bedtime.
• Tuesday was tinged with a bit of sadness, and a touch of frenzy. It was my last day in the office, so all the final face-to-face stuff I needed to get done had to be done now, before I left for the plane. I was also cognizant that this was my last chance for good, high-quality Internet access before I got back to Redmond. (Airport and hotel WiFi is usually fine, but you just can't trust that it'll work when you need it.)
• Brooke is staying on for a bit of vacation; his wife is flying in on Friday, so he'll be working the rest of the week in China and then the two of them are off for some much-needed R&R in Shanghai.
• Tuesday afternoon is also time for shopping. I promised some folks back home that I'd bring them Olympic souvenirs, and so we're off to one of the gadzillion Olympics shops to find appropriate stuff.
• While out, my curiosity finally gets the better of me and I drag Brooke and our colleague, Ray, to McDonald's. I'm eager to see what the local experience is like, and, as expected, it's pretty adapted to local tastes. I order the cheeseburger, and am surprised to find that the thing is wholly unlike what we get in the States - the meat is tastier; the cheese is different (lactose-free), and covered in paprika; it has the same special sauce as the Big Mac (but no ketchup or mustard); instead of pickles, it has raw cucumbers.
• (In all seriousness, if they sold this burger in the US, I'd buy it. It's really yummy.)
• The fries are perfect. There is no Diet Coke. And if you want your meal to go, a plastic bag is 0.2 Yuan.
• More souvenir shopping, this time on behalf of my colleague Stuart, who has asked me to bring him back some "authentically Chinese" alcohol ("Look, Russia has vodka, Ireland has whiskey, China's got their something. If you can locate a flask of whatever the heck that happens to be, that'll rock."). After conferring with Ray, we duck in to a convenience store and select a small, 100ml green glass bottle of something that Ray assures me is both "authentic" and "very popular". We also select a slightly-larger (200 ml) clear bottle of something else that is "not as authentic, but is also very popular." The combined price for the booze is 10 Yuan (about $1.50); the alcohol content of each bottle is 56%.
• (In the back of my mind, I'm praying that this stuff won't cause wood alcohol blindness.)
• Back at the hotel bar, Brooke and I both realize how badly we're missing our wives when, over successive rounds of drinks, we find ourselves engaging in an ever-escalating "argument" about which one of us managed to marry farther above his station.
• Wednesday comes, and I'm up early. My flight is at 8:55 AM, so I'm out the door of the hotel at 6. (Sigh)
• Once again, my taxi has no seatbelts. And, while this is something I managed to get used to while riding in the city, it's considerably less fun when we're going 120 km/hr on the aggressive Beijing freeway with less than a carlength between us and the vehicle in front of us.
• After arriving at the airport, I check in for my flight and spend a scant 15 minutes waiting in line at customs. I give my passport control person a "very satisfied" as I head to the gate.
• Walking to the gate, it becomes clear what a full-blown shopping mall the Beijing airport really us. Once again, I'm struck by how many American and international brands are offered for sale. If you need a Hugo Boss shirt with your Starbucks before that flight to Tokyo, you're good to go.
• On the four-hour leg between Beijing and Tokyo, I watch "The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters", which is an incredible documentary about two guys competing for the world record in Donkey Kong. It's a funny, poignant, and totally gripping human drama, and I loved it.
• In Tokyo, I manage to snag some WiFi and find, to my delight, that Elaine is still up and heading to bed. We flirt shamelessly for a good 15 or 20 minutes before my flight starts boarding.
• "Be Kind, Rewind" is charming and totally disposable.
• The flight touches down in Seattle at 8:25 AM, Pacific Time.

Damn, it's good to be home.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 3, 2008 3:32 PM.
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July 22, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 7

We woke up on Sunday to our second day of official non-work in Beijing, so Brooke and I decided to go for the the Big One of sightseeing - The Great Wall Of China.

• Hao and Fara claim that the best place to see the Wall is from Mutianyu, which is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing. They arranged a car and driver, and the four of us were off shortly after breakfast.
• The weather was not terribly cooperative - foggy, misty, and wet. Our visibility never really got beyond a few hundred feet. Each of us kept waiting for the sun to break through, or for us to leave the weather behind - never happened.
• We arrive at the base of the Great Wall, and find ourselves at tourist central. The path to the Wall is one gigantic tourist trap, with small shacks lining the walkway and selling every kind of Great Wall paraphernalia you can imagine - postcards, t-shirts, photos, knickknacks, ponchos, umbrellas, you name it. There's also fruit stands, snack stands, places selling water and beer. The sellers are aggressive, too, calling out in English phrases to get your attention, then trying to haggle with you on whatever item they saw you glancing at.
• Arriving at the base of the Wall is one thing; getting to the Wall is another. The government has installed a gondola to get people from the base to the Wall itself, but there's also a walking/hiking path made of stone. We opt for the hike. The climb is steep, and takes a good 20 minutes; I am reminded of the sand stairs at Baker Beach during Alcatraz. The moist weather isn't helping, either - it's like walking in a cloud. We pause as needed.
• The Wall astounds. The Great Wall is something I'd read about, of course, in my eight-grade history class (thanks again, Mr. DuBois, wherever you are), but, like the Pyramids or any of the other Seven Wonders, the Great Wall was something that was safely tucked in the pages of a book, and not an actual object that I'd be stomping around on one day.
• (And yet, here I am, and here it is, and here I find myself shaking my head with wonder about how small the world really is these days.)
• The overwhelming physicality of the Wall is incredible. It is made entirely of rough brick, made smooth and sloping in places from the contours of the land (which it hugs) or the erosion of millions of footsteps (which is has undoubtedly endured).
• At its heart, the Wall is a 20-foot-wide brick roadway, built to a height of about 30 feet. It follows the line of the mountain on which it's built, and has periodic guard buildings placed for lookouts and shelter for the soldiers that manned it.
• The thing is about as far from an antiseptic, safe-for-tourists attraction as you can imagine. The Wall slants and slopes, is slippery, has loose bricks, and offers many places to twist an ankle or fall on your ass. The hills are high and steep; going up is hard, coming down is harder. We feel like mountain goats.
• At no point does anybody complain about anything. The walk might be hard (and capable of taking the wind out of you), but, for all that, some poor bastards had to actually build it, which boggles the mind. (Your job, Oh 21st-Century Western Tourist, does not suck as much as you imagine.)
• Admission to the cable car at the Great Wall: about $10. T-shirt from a vendor at the Great Wall: 3 for $1. International roaming charges for the 2 minutes you use to call your wife from the Great Wall to tell her you love her and miss her? Priceless.
• The Wall is dotted with locals who are selling snacks, fruit and beverages. They sell from small milk crates, from hot-dog carts, from whatever they have. A number of them lead with "cold beer!" in English, which I think is strange - with this kind of climb, who wants to drink beer?
• It's easy to get vertigo up here.
• We ultimately walk the Wall from our arrival point to the 20th guard house (the end point of the zone), turn around and go back, past our arrival, and to the gondola. All told, it takes us about four hours. We take the gondola down, survive the tourist gantlet, and head back to Beijing. We are all smiling.
• All told, Beijing is incredibly clean. We see very little litter, and very few homeless. I am told that the government has been cleaning things up in advance of the Olympics.
• Olympics stuff is everywhere - banners, flags, logos, the mascots, billboards, bus boards, street signs. The city is swept with Olympics mania, and everyone is very happy and proud about it.
• A surprising number of signs come in English and Chinese. We see lots of Engrish.
• Hao and Fara take us to an expat district, which spans a river and has a healthy number of bars and nightclubs. Many of them have sofas and lounge chairs on the sidewalk, and are aggressive about getting you to sit down. We find a place that looks good, grab a table, and order some great local beer. It's outrageously expensive by Beijing standards, but about half the price of something comparable in the States. We watch gaggles of tourists zip by in the backs of rickshaws, taking in the sights.
• I want to by a t-shirt for Elaine, so Hao takes us to Plastered, which is a Beijing staple of hipness. I find her a super-cute white tee with a sketch of a Beijing subway ticket on it; I get myself an attractive blue number with "Kung Pao Chicken" written on it in Chinese. Hao assures me this is very, very, very funny.
• (Given some of the looks I get, I wonder if the shirt really says, "I'm a silly white guy who can't read Chinese", but the shirt is great, regardless.)
• Taxis in Beijing are mostly Hyundais, blue-and-gold Elantras. 2 yuan per km, 10 yuan minimum.
• After tromping around the dusty alleys of the city all afternoon, dinner is full-on culture shock - we go two blocks and find ourselves at a state-of-the-art shopping mall, all gleaming steel and glass, Starbucks and KFC, eleven stories, full of teenagers and cell phones and you name it. We could be anywhere in the States. We have some fantastic Chinese for dinner, knock back a couple of Tsingtaos, and call it a night.
• I sleep very, very, very well.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2008 9:00 PM.
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July 14, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 6

After three days of hard work, the weekend arrived. Brooke and I decided to do a bit o' sightseeing.

• From The "Jet Lag Cries 'Uncle'" Department: I awoke on Saturday to a feeling that was wholly alien, bizarre, and unfamiliar - that is, I felt refreshed and happy. No horrible fatigue behind the eyes, no crazy dark circles, no slow-draggin' of my sorry self from the bed to the shower. Eyes opened, smile appeared, bounced out of bed. About. Freakin'. Time.
• A peek out the hotel windows reveals that the weather is cooperative. A bit of sun is breaking through the white Beijing fogginess; the city seems to be inviting us in.
• Two of our colleagues, Hao and Fara, generously agree to show us the city, to which Brooke and I readily agree. They prove to be fantastic guides.
• First stop: The Temple of Heaven, 600-year-old complex that is now a public park, much like the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. People are strolling down paths, playing modified games of hacky sack (with this crazy, badminton-esque shuttlecock thingy), taking pictures, gawking at the relics. The Temple grounds are walled off from the rest of Beijing, and go on (seemingly) forever. We take it all in, walking from the north end of the park to the south, then out to the east.
• My longstanding transit fetish is indulged with a quick trip on the Beijing Subway system; we take Subway Line #5 to a shopping district not too far from the Temple. The subway is thoroughly modern, clean, and quiet - stations of this design are typical of any Western city (frankly, we could be in London, for all anyone knows). The #5 uses glassed-in tubes, much like Line 14 on the Paris Metro.
• Tickets are 2 Yuan (about $0.30).
• For lunch, we hit this Brazilian BBQ buffet restaurant. It's apparently a very popular cuisine in town, and the waiters are forever visiting our table with skewers of this or that meat on them, trying to carve off pieces for us to try. Everything is delicious.
• After much moral dithering, I ask to try Starbucks. Fara and Hao crack smiles; Brooke looks vaguely relieved. Turns out that Starbucks in Beijing is pretty much Starbucks everywhere; apart from the Chinese on the menu, the items, options, and prices (adjusted for Yuan) are identical.
• (The place is full of Westerners. I hear more unaccented American English in 20 minutes than I've heard in the last 5 days.)
• Starbucks also has free WiFi, which allows me to take my iPhone out of airplane mode and send an "I miss you" e-mail to Elaine.
• We pop back to the subway and transfer to Line 1 (the oldest line), which ultimately takes us to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.
• Look, there's no real way to convey how huge these structures and places are in words, so I'll just say this: we emerged from the subway, strode a few steps, turned to the left, and ... the expanse just goes on. Tiananmen Square is a broad, sprawling expanse of concrete, brick and emptiness, bordered by the Forbidden City at one end and government buildings on the others. It's enormous. Standing alone on a football field at night might give you a sense of it, but just barely.
• There are tourists, citizens, and guards everywhere. The cameras-per-square-inch ratio goes up noticeably.
• We walk the square to the gates of the Forbidden City (adorned with a gigantic picture of Chairman Mao), and then walk in.
• Beijing is a city built on a series of concentric rings. The inner ring, Ring 1, is the oldest; subsequent rings represent later generations of the city's growth. The Forbidden City is, in a literal sense, Ring 1 - it's the original seat of power, the home to the emperors who ruled China for centuries. It's called "Forbidden" because you would be killed if you went in without permission. Today, about 50 Yuan does the trick.
• The emperors are gone, but the Forbidden City is preserved by the Chinese government as a public museum - a museum that runs 1km by .7km square. It's big.
• The City contains everything a city would expect to have - buildings for the people who lived there, for the various support functions (guards, priests, etc.), for ceremonies, for celebrations, for dining and you name it. The City is surrounded by a high brick wall, and that has a moat outside it for good measure.
• Hao and Fara have arranged for a guide to take us around the city, and they leave Brooke and me alone to head out to connect with her. I stand, just trying to drink it all in and ... failing. It's too much.
• The level of detail in this place is mind-blowing. I look at rooftops, and notice that the roofs are ornately adorned, hand-carved, hand-painted. Every surface has incredible detail, which means you can sit on a bench and stare at a wall and see something new just about every time you move your eyes. As I take this in, it dawns on me that all of it was built without the aid of robotics, computers, or mass-manufacturing techniques of any kind. It's just ... craftsmanship.
• Oh, yeah: no nails. Anywhere.
• The tour is about two hours. We walk and walk and walk, ducking down alleyways, taking in exhibits of concubine's quarters, seeing the temples and the seats of power. The guide is good; she knows her stuff. Very shortly, I'm in overload.
• The doors in this place are not built for white guys with high-protein diets. I duck a lot.
• The toilets are ... well, they're holes in the floor. Porcelain, yes, reasonably clean, yes, but you better have good knees and a sense of humor if you need to use the can.
• We wind up leaving as the City is closing, which makes hailing a cab a rather time-consuming activity.
• Dinner is Schezuan at a place off a hutong. As expected, the food is astoundingly good. We drink Tsingtao, a local Chinese beer that's light, refreshing, and not too booze-y.
• I woke up easy, but I go to bed hard - it's been a long day. (I'm still smiling, however.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2008 9:37 PM.
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July 9, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 4 & 5

(Sorry it's taking me so long to get to these entries; this being my first full week back at work, life's a bit hectic.)

More China notes:

• Thursday and Friday were both traditional work days, in the sense that I got up, brushed/showered/shaved/brokefast and then headed to the office. The fact that I was working from the Beijing office - rather than on West campus in Redmond - was not lost, exactly, but it didn't manifest itself very often - generally, only when I'd get away from my screen or campus. Seen one Microsoft office, seen most of 'em.
• (There's something surreal about being able to fly halfway around the world and live, essentially, as if you were still at home. Maybe Snow Crash is right, the future's just going to be a worldwide, smeared-out sameness.)
• Microsoft's Beijing office is pretty nice. It's a 6-story building, plus a sub-level; the main floor is for visitors (and has some additional retail tenants); the second floor on up is all for employees. The sublevel (the employees all call it "P1") is like a mini-mall for employees - a few food places (one of which serves a mean rice bowl), a health club (with swimming pool), a barbershop, that sort of thing. Convenient.
• After avoiding its deadly grasp for the past two days, jet lag finally stalked and caught me on Thursday afternoon. I was on deadline for a project (deliverable due 5 PM), cranking away, and suddenly just ... hit the wall. Brooke had it, too; I'm surprised we weren't drooling on ourselves. Walking around the halls seemed to help, but there wasn't enough Nescafe in the world to resuscitate me. I just had to hope for the second wind.
• Thursday dinner was a special treat - Peking duck. The restaurant was very high-end, very swanky, and dated from 1864; they even provided a 'certificate of authenticity' for the duck (now up on the wall of my office), which contained the duck's serial number (#77648, as in "we have served 77,648 ducks since we opened"). No fooling.
• Everyone here - on the street, in the office, in shops, taxis, etc. - is very friendly. A lot of people will immediately ask us where we're from, and many will try their English.
• (For some odd reason, they don't think two 6'+ pasty white-guy geeks look like natives.)
• Beijing weather is low-70s in the evening, mid-90s in the daytime. It's humid, too. It feels like Houston to me.
• There's an odd cultural thing I keep observing where people - friends - walk down the street holding hands. It's very common, and everyone seems to do it. One of my coworkers tells me that "it doens't mean what it means in the States", which makes me laugh.
• After dinner, four of us went out for a massage near our hotel. It was, without question, one of the best massages I have ever had in my life - one where they treat you like bread dough, pushing, pulling and dragging you into various shapes until you're just a puddle on the floor. The whole thing ran around 90 minutes, and cost about 90 Yuan (about $13) for each of us.
• One the way out, I asked one of my Beijing colleagues about the prices - and about the masseuses, all of whom were twentysomething women. He explained that each masseuse likely got 20 - 25 Yuan for each massage, and they probably did four or so per day. That may not seem like a lot to some (it didn't to me), but 80 - 100 Yuan a day is 400 - 500 a week, and 1600 - 2000 a month. In a town where ~900 Yuan/month is considered a good living wage (you can hire a combo cook/nanny/housekeeper for that), doing massage is considered a good job. And for many Chinese, it's incredibly attractive relative to staying in a village, where the prospects aren't nearly as bright - or the freedom as broad - as they are in the city.
• (I have to say, it's a little disconcerting to grok the economics of a place with such a huge labor pool, and such disparities between modern urban and old-country rural.)
• A lot of the city seems retrofitted - apartment buildings with AC systems bolted to the side of every unit, storefronts that are mostly facades against older buildings underneath. There's a citywide sensibility of re-use, of upgrade. It feels vaguely steampunk-ish. MAKE magazine would love this city.
• Friday was an early-morning arrival at the office (jet lag + more deliverables), and I got to walk the (semi-deserted) streets in the cool air. I was taken aback at how few people were out and about; Beijing is busy, full of people, and to see the place without too many bodies was jarring.
• Even at 6 AM, the city is covered in the same flat, fog-diffused light that you see at all hours. No variance at all.
• Microsoft Beijing cultural observation: the nighttime staff makes tea, using fresh leaves, and puts them in all the offices in these nifty glass carafes. It's delicious.
• 3:30 PM - Midway through a presentation, I do the jet-lag stall (it's 12:30 AM Pacific), and it's all I can do to keep focused. Following the preso, I begin mainlining Nescafe.
• Driving in Beijing is crazy. CRAZY. In the States, we tend to like our roads segmented - sidewalk, car lane, bike lane, crosswalk - each marked with its own line, its own rules, and we want our people to stay where they're supposed to be. Beijing is totally different. Nobody in Beijing gives a damn about lanes, lines, or anything else: cars mix with trucks mix with buses and pedestrians and cyclists and guys on mopeds and some other guy with a bicycle pulling a trailer with a 10 ft. x 10 ft. x 10 ft. bundle of empty plastic bottles he's taking to the recycler. People stroll out in the street when they want to, and, when confronted with the horn of an oncoming car/bus/etc. (moving at 20 - 25 mph, max), they pause, 2" from the side of the inbound vehicle, watch it slide by, and then continue.
• In its own way, it's actually beautiful. It makes me wonder, too, about throughput - is Beijing's road system packet-switched, compared to the circuit-switched system in the US? With so many people, maybe they need to work as packets to get anything done.
• American brands are everywhere. KFC is to the Beijing fast-food market what McDonald's is to the USA (but, it must be said, McDonald's is pretty commonplace). Wal-Mart is here. Bally Total Fitness is here. Starbucks is here. The list goes on.
• We close the evening - and the week - with karaoke (natch), at what is, easily, the nicest karaoke place on Earth. Private suites, leather couches, flatscreen monitors for the cheesy videos, great sound system, wireless mics, touch-screen jukebox, in-suite catering. Unbelievable. The place was busy, too - we walked down a couple long hallways of suites, each full of private parties.
• (Yes, Brooke and I sang - a little Tears for Fears, a little "Bust A Move", even "Never Gonna Give You Up". There are pictures. There is absolutely, positively no video or audio recording.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2008 8:31 PM.
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July 5, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 3

Wednesday, June 25:

• The hotel has, perhaps, the best breakfast buffet I've ever experienced. It's got a huge range of food choices - Chinese, Indian, western, you name it (likely necessary due to their expat clientele). You can get anything from pork-filled buns to curry to Cheerios to omelettes. The food's of good quality, too, and very tasty.
• (On the downside, the hotel insists on playing soft Western music (e.g., Wham!, the "Titanic" soundtrack) during breakfast, which, while initially earning points for kitch, gets old very, very quickly as the week continues.)
• The Microsoft office is about 1km from the hotel, so we walk.
• Beijing is enveloped in a white, cloudlike, foggy substance - visibility peters out about 1,000 feet away in any given direction. At first, I'm not sure if this is pollution or fog or what, but it doesn't have any appreciable smell, and doesn't irritate my eyes or lungs. It also never goes away for the duration of the trip. Huh.
• At 7:30 AM, the streets are full of people - people on foot, people on bikes, people on mopeds, people in cars, people in buses (the buses are packed), people streaming in and out of subway stations, people, people, people. Everyone has a bustle and a focus, and nobody seems to pay anyone else very much attention. It's got a fascinating rhythm to it; I feel like I could sit and watch the flow for hours.
• The Beijing Microsoft office is exactly like every other Microsoft office I've ever been to, except I can't read half the signs.
• Brooke and I, badly jet-lagging, grab coffee from a Nescafe machine in the shared kitchen. It turns out to be very, very, very yummy.
• Our first order of business is an 8 AM video conference call with some folks back home in Redmond, where it's still Tuesday, 5 PM. After yawning and blinking and drinking oceans of coffee to keep my focus, I now have a much greater degree of empathy for my Chinese colleagues.
• After the call, Brooke and I hole up in an empty office and focus on getting things done.
• Working remotely is actually pretty nice because you can focus. During my usual workday, I regularly shut off my e-mail and IM for periods of time to give myself unbroken stretches where I can concentrate and get in to flow. It's a deliberate effort, and one that can be controversial (people sometimes expect you to reply to email right. this. very. second.). When you're 15 hours ahead, your work day starts as the home office is closing down for the night (8 AM = 5 PM), so the majority of the e-mail that was going to be sent that day has already been sent. As such, when I arrive I slurp down all the mail that was sent during the day, process it, and ... that's it. Not much new comes in during my day, and the quiet is wonderful. I'm able to really crank on some of my projects.
• Around 2:38 PM, we get punchy enugh to start Rick Rolling one another. The Dramatic Prarie Dog also makes an apearance. More Nescafe does not seem to be helping.
• For dinner, our Microsoft colleagues take us out to a very nice, very modern Chinese restaurant. At one point, I went to set my napkin on my lap, and one of my fellows gently explains that this is considered rude - I was "taking the job" of the server at the restaurant who was supposed to do that. Hmm.
• The food is amazing.
• By the end of the day, I'm exhausted - deep-bone exhausted, everything-is-funny exhausted, walking-like-a-slightly-drunk-person exhausted. I return to my hotel room, brush my teeth, and call it a day.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 5, 2008 11:14 AM.
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July 2, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 1 (& 2)

Last week, Microsoft sent me to Beijing (along with my fellow MacBU-er Brooke) on business. Our flight left Seattle on Monday, the 23rd; I got home this morning. This afternoon's been a bit brutal, energy-wise - my internal clock is still 15 hours ahead of Pacific time, so my 8:25 AM landing (it's the morning!) was 11:55 PM to me (it's time for bed!).

The last 10 days have been a total whirlwind. While very much a work trip, we managed to use our weekend stayover for a bit of sightseeing. Very exciting.

As usual, I took a few notes during the trip:

• During my Monday-morning suitcase-stuffing extravaganza, I peek at Dashboard, which says that Beijing has a low of 70 and a high of 95 all week. Yowza. Pack shorts.
• Brooke's wife gave us a lift to the airport, so on the way out of town we stopped by Vivace for one final cup of Seattle coffee. We then popped downtown so I could give Elaine a goodbye hug at her office. Mid-squeeze, I'm reminded of why I was glad when my insane Product Planning travel schedule came to a close last year.
• Since the time difference between Seattle and Beijing is so pronounced, it meant that our Monday afternoon departure wouldn't land in China until late Tuesday night. (Dude, where's my Tuesday?)
• We're on Northwest for this trip, living large in business class (Microsoft travel policy lets you go business if your flight is more than 7 hours). After clearing Seattle airport security, we head to the South terminal and check out the Northwest executive lounge. It's my first time there, and it's pretty excellent: plenty of windows (lots of natural light), tables (places to spread out and work), free soda and coffee, free WiFi, and lots of quiet.
• (Brooke and I are, I think, the most casually-dressed people in the lounge.)
• Business class is addictive: champagne before takeoff, a fresh Wall Street Journal, an appetizer of seared Ahi tuna skewers with ginger and cucumber. We remark to each other, many times, that we are forever ruined when it comes to future travel in coach.
• Northwest's Airbus A330s have AC power outlets in business. My initial feeling of joy ("Score!") gives way to mild annoyance as I realize the flight's AC power system is put together with baling wire and a couple of D batteries. The juice stops frequently, which makes it hard to sustain (or retain) a laptop charge. Our power manages to last the whole flight (and I have an outbox of queued up e-mail to prove it), but things feel very touch-and-go most of the time.
• Our flight connects through Tokyo. I've never been to Japan before, so as we're descending I'm peering out the window of the plane like a 5-year old in front of a toy store, nose pressed against the glass and trying to absorb everything I'm seeing. The country is unbelievably green - they have farms and fields laid out in grids as far as the eye can see, incredibly lush and gorgeous.
• We arrive in Tokyo at 4:15 PM, local time. We are pooped.
• My iPhone can't seem to lock on to a cellular provider in Japan. I had this fantasy that I'd be able to zip around the world and at least have the option of paying $4.99 a minute on foreign networks, but apparently the AT&T people aren't talking to their Japanese counterparts. Grr.
• The Tokyo airport has a McDonald's. Next to a sushi bar. I swear I am not making this up.
• On the flight from Tokyo to Beijing, I watch "Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man", which I find to be an insightful and balanced portrait of a very complicated and stubborn guy. It starts with his work in the 1960s and 1970s, and then proceeds up to his 2000 presidential bid. Truthfully, I'd been a bit mad at Nader over 2000, and had seen him as a spoiler for Gore. After the movie ... well, I'm not mad anymore; I think I have a good sense of where he's coming from. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I do think I understand him a bit better. Highly recommended.
• After the film, I manage to sleep for an hour.
• We touch down at 9:28 PM, local time (6:28 AM Pacific).
• Beijing's airport is gigantic, just enormous. It seems to go on forever. We taxi for a full 15 minutes after landing, and never run out of new things to look at - stretches of tarmac and clusters of buildings, going on and on and on.
• The plane's doors pop, and the weather hits us. Beijing feels a lot like Houston - humid and hot, almost menacingly so, as if the weather wants you to know that it can take things from "pretty warm" to "Crock-Pot cooking" whenever it feels like it.
• Inside, the airport looks like any other modern European airport, except with Chinese signage. Most signs and displays have English translations; international pictograms are used for bathrooms, exits, and the like. Navigating is not a problem.
• The Chinese customs people are friendly and polite. They also have a push-button customer-satisfaction poll on the customer's side of the counter; you push the smiley-face or frowny-face that matches your experience ("Very satisfied", "satisfied", "unsatisfied", "Very unsatisfied"). I give my guy a "very satisfied" and head off to get my bag.
• We are met at the airport by some of our fellow Microsofties. They meet us in front of ... the Starbucks. (I am a sad, sad Seattle cliche.)
• A taxi is procured to take us in to Beijing proper, and our hotel. I had been warned about the driving in China, but the reality of it is really quite striking - people change lanes whenever they want, drive at different speeds on the freeway (very fast, very slow), pass on the shoulder, you name it. For all the chaos, the drivers seem acclimated, alert, and ready for anything.
• (Brooke and I are both alarmed to find that our taxi doesn't have seatbelts in the rear seats. As we later learn, virtually none of them do.)
• Our taxi ride takes 45 minutes, and sets us back 75 Yuan. That's about $10 US.
• The hotel is very nice, very clean, and clearly caters to visiting Western businesspeople and tourists.
• After unpacking everything, I notice the small sign in the bathroom - "The tap water is not safe for drinking." The hotel has set out two 12-oz bottles of (privately branded) water for personal use. I'd been warned about the water situation before leaving, but being confronted with it still requires a shift in my thinking. I need to use these two bottles for pretty much everything - drinking, rinsing my toothbrush, taking vitamins, everything. Conserving water becomes something I think about a lot during the trip, and I find myself wondering whether this kind of water rationing is something humanity as a whole is going to have to get used to in the future.
• Slightly before midnight, I bomb out.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 2, 2008 4:47 PM.
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May 13, 2008

Office 2008 SP1

I'm happy to report that my colleagues at MacBU shipped the first service pack to Office 2008 (2008 SP1) today; you can get the bits directly from the "downloads" section of our Web site, or you can wait a day or two for it to appear in AutoUpdate.

All the product teams worked incredibly hard on this release, and I'm very proud to see the results getting out to customers. If you're interested in the scope of what got done, check out the KB article.

It's also worth pointing out that Office 2008 is a barnburner, sales-wise:

Office 2008 launched at Macworld Expo 2008, and sales for the productivity suite continue to soar, selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years.

..."The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004,” said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU.

(Awesome.)

UPDATE: Schwieb has a great post on SP1 on his blog. Check it out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2008 7:15 PM.
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May 9, 2008

The New Commute

My commute has changed quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.

For starters, I'm on two wheels once in a while. May is here, which is Bike To Work Month (with Bike To Work Day on the 16th). May also represents the last month before the Alcatraz tri, which means that, assuming I don't want to flail spectacularly in San Francisco, I needed to get out, buy a bike, and actually start using it pretty regularly.

My solution has been to start riding to work a couple times a week - or, in some cases, ride to work one day and then ride home the next or the day after.

I'm very fortunate in that 99% of my ride is along the Burke-Gilman and Sammamish River bike trails, which are mostly flat, 100% free of cars, have periodic water stops and bathrooms, and run through some spectacular scenery. The total work-home commute mileage is around 26 (each direction), which takes me just shy of 2 hours. We have lockers and showers in the building adjoining MacBU, which makes it even simpler.

It's a easy, gorgeous ride, and a hell of a way to start the morning. I can't recommend it more highly.

When I'm not on my bike, I'm on the bus. I've moved from regular Metro transit to Microsoft's private bus service - "The Connector." The company rolled out Phase 1 of the service back in September, and recently kicked off Phase Two, adding a bunch of new routes (one of which is right by our place).

I was a bit torn about switching to the Connector. While it's a great perk for people with poor bus service to campus (e.g., you live in the suburbs, or a less commute-friendly part of Seattle, such as Ballard), we've got great bus service where I live. Further, the Connector seemed to be a bit of a push in terms of transit time (it's a private bus, not a private helicopter, so we're still stuck in the same traffic with everyone else), and the system requires advance reservation (through a Web site) to ensure that everyone gets a seat.

In fact, the service is amazing.

First, in terms of real-world throughput, Connector buses are actually faster than Metro. The shuttles leave precisely on time, which is a godsend if you've ever played the 5 - 15 minute waiting game that sometimes happens with popular Metro bus lines. It's understandable - Connector routes have 3 stops, total, while a typical Metro bus will stop, you know, 14,000 or 15,000 times over a decent-sized route. With such precise timing, you spend less time checking your watch at a Connector stop, and you can rely on the Connector being ready at the same time every day.

Second, Connectors all have free WiFi. While this isn't unique (many SoundTransit buses have it, too), the thing that makes it awesome is...

Third, Connectors guarantee you a seat, and have space for your bags. This is the big one. Being guaranteed a seat - and knowing that it won't be Sardine Can Seating - means you can walk out the door with your laptop under your arm and be confident that you can do some violence to your e-mail (or Web surf, or whatever) while on the road. It's wonderful, because I know I can defer some of my last-minute work to when I'm on the bus, be confident of getting it done, and walk through the door of my condo with a clear mind and a closed MacBook Pro.

Connector Phase Two was just rolled out this week, and the buses are already at capacity - a trend I expect to continue as the good word spreads. Part of this is simple gas-price economics - as BusinessWeek wrote, "Suddenly, It's Cool To Take The Bus", and, indeed I've seen several e-mail threads from car-centric colleagues extolling the virtues of not having to drive in our stop-n-go traffic anymore.

More than anything, the biking and the bus-riding have helped me reclaim some of my commute as "me time" - time to get healthy, see my community, get a few more things done in the day - instead of feeling like it's The Great Sucking Sound of emotional energy and patience that I associate with driving.

If you're sick of your commute and are ready for a change, try your bike or a bus. You won't regret it.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 9, 2008 12:43 PM.
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May 5, 2008

Microsoft's Own Little EPCOT

Last week, I was fortunate enough to tour the Microsoft Center for Information Work (CIW) and the Microsoft Home (aka, "The Home Of The Future").

If you don't know what these are, they're very much akin to a Microsoft "concept car," a never-to-be-built prototype of a possible tomorrow that demonstrates how people might work together (or, in the case of the Home, live together) with a little extra technology, smartly deployed.

Tours are generally available only to VIPs (and the occasional lucky employee), and most of the stuff that is shown off is strictly under NDA. So I can't go in to any kind of detail about what was shown, or the general direction of the content.

That said, the most interesting thing to me about both tours - and I suppose this was made all the more apparent because I took them back-to-back - was how utterly, completely, and totally Disney-like they were. It felt, eerily, like I was on some Microsoft-sponsored exhibit at EPCOT or Tomorrowland.

Neither exhibit has audio-animatronics, but they do have the Disney exhibit hallmarks - a "concept" or storyline that serves as the narrative for the time you spend in the exhibit, audience interaction that moves the story forward, a series of lessons that are taught as part of the experience (Disney goes with things like, "Protect The Earth"), and, of course, insanely high production values.

Another Disney parallel is that both the CIW and the Home suffer from the "Tomorrowland Problem" - namely, that the future has an awkward (and consistent) way of, you know, actually happening, which means that one year's breathtakingly cool and cutting-edge exhibit is next year's collective yawn. I remember walking through the "Innoventions" pavilion in Tomorrowland back in 2001, and listening to a Cast Member breathlessly describe how, in the future, people would actually listen to the radio through the Internet (...isn't technology amazing?).

I remember laughing to myself, checking my watch to make sure it wasn't still 1995, and strolling over to Space Mountain.

Keeping up with the future is hard problem, and it's easy to get snarky about some of the more fantastical or implausible parts of these sorts of exhibits. That said, both the CIW and the Home are pretty well-done, and I've found that a few of the ideas that were shown off are still sticking with me, popping in to my cerebellum now and again and attaching themselves to some of my other, more "grounded" projects.

Which is, of course, the point.

I wonder how many other companies are doing this sort of thing - producing Disney-fied exhibits to tell the story of their business, product, technologies, or vision. Certainly, plenty of organizations offer plant tours or behind-the-scenes glimpses to the public or VIPs. As the stakes go up for these sorts of tours - particularly among companies that sell ideas - I have to imagine that a lot of Imagineers are going to find themselves lucrative work as private consultants.

Overall, a terrific experience - particularly the Home. The Microsoft Web site has a number of still images from the Home - be sure to check them out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 5, 2008 9:16 PM.
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January 25, 2008

Office 2008: The 10-Minute Walkthrough

The fine folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog have posted an interview with MacBU's own Amanda Lefebvre.

Shot at Macworld, Amanda spends a good 10 minutes talking about Office 2008 and showing off a number of the new, cool things you can do with the suite. It's a solid primer for folks thinking about upgrading.

(Nice work, Amanda!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 25, 2008 4:35 PM.
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January 13, 2008

Off To Macworld

Macworld kicks off tomorrow, and a good chunk of the MacBU (including yours truly) are heading down to San Francisco to meet customers, take questions, and show off Office 2008.

I'll be working the Microsoft booth during the week, so if you're at the show, be sure to stop off, introduce yourself, and say hello!

(And, if you're at the show, don't forget to print your Keynote Bingo card!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 13, 2008 8:52 AM.
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December 19, 2007

Scale

It's the holiday time of year, which means that Elaine and I have been catching up with old friends at parties and family gatherings. Time and again, I keep getting asked about my "new" (four months in, and it's still "new") job at MacBU - what it's like, what a "program manager" actually does, and so on.

Generally, I get asked what I like about the new gig, or what's surprised me the most. The answer is the same: scale.

I've spent my entire career in tech, doing services (Internet access/Web hosting), custom software (Web application development), and consulting. In each of these areas, I've always seen through the lens of a small business - my partners and I had companies that offered something to a defined population, and we customized, where possible, for specific audiences and needs. In many ways, this was the geek equivalent of running a Saturday-afternoon lemonade stand - you brew your lemonade, hang out a shingle, and look for thirsty customers. Since you're the one selling the lemonade, you have a personal encounter with most everyone you do business with. Your transactions are in your native language, and likely all in cash. The product you're selling is the product you've got - there's no customization or after-market. It's a simple business, and a satisfying one.

Making software that's used by millions of people, by contrast, is not a simple business.

Let's take the product I deal with - Office for Macintosh - as an example.

First, Mac Office isn't just used by one type of person - it's used by millions of different people. We use research to develop customer segmentations and personas that we can rely on to help guide our product investments. However, the devil is in the details - if you're trying to cater the product to a user that is less technical, say, then you need to do a good job of remembering what problem you're actually helping them solve (as the old saying goes, "Nobody buys a drill; rather, people buy a 2" hole in their wall").

Your feature needs to be built in such a way that it's also attractive, as much as possible, to other customer segments, who will have different assumptions about what your feature should or should not allow them to do. You're forever trading off complexity for simplicity - what's "flexible" to one person is "confusing as hell" to another. Product designs have to be tested, tested, and tested again - you can't just put a crazy idea in the box and ship it.

Second, Mac Office comes in a number of languages (English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and so on). Consequently, the product is sold in a number of different countries, each with their own specific market requirements and government regulations. As a practical matter, this means we have to have people who are doing translation and localization work, but it also means that, as product designers, we have to worry about specific aspects of the product that you might not think about.

Small things - an icon, say - might be just fine in the United States, but be really offensive to members of a certain group in another country. "Smiley faces", for instance, can imply one thing in one culture (e.g., happiness), and something else again somewhere else. We have teams of people who are responsible for ensuring that our products have been checked for just this sort of thing, and are acceptable to a global audience.

Third, Mac Office isn't just used by the people who buy the product at the Apple Store. There are lots of people who are responsible for installing, updating, and supporting our software (e.g., IT administrators at universities or corporations; parents on computers at home), many of whom have concerns about keeping their systems stable, secure, and available. We have people who work on things like the Installer - something that many people don't think about (most end users only fire up the installer once, when they first get the product), but that are critically important to this community. We have people who worry about security, people who worry about "sustained engineering" (those are the friendly folks who bring you the .1, .2, and .3 updates), and people who do nothing but bang on our products all day long and try to break them before customers get their hands on them. Each of these teams has its own set of requirements and concerns, and many of these teams can prevent the product from shipping if they feel that their concerns are not being addressed.

Fourth, Mac Office has a partner community - people who have extended our products with their own code or intellectual property. Much of our product can be accessed programmatically, using macro languages in the products themselves, or external languages like AppleScript. When you design a feature, you need to think about how someone might want to access it programmatically - how they might want to build on top of your stuff. You also need to make sure that this has been well-tested by your colleagues in quality control.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point - at scale, software is much, much more than it appears to be, and has some incredibly important aspects (e.g., security, quality testing) that users never see.

(Since arriving, I've felt a bit like Charlie, getting a tour of the Wonka factory.)

I mean, I knew this stuff existed - I saw it, at lemonade-stand scale, when I was working for myself - but to actually step on to the factory floor and see the blue ball machine running full-tilt ... it's a bit dizzying.

One intriguing aspect to all this is that no change is simple. God knows I've sat in front of software on more than one occasion and proclaimed, "Augh! If only this product did [blank] - I mean, how hard can it be?"

Answer: damn hard. There's no such thing as a "simple" change, because even "simple" changes need to be run through the necessary machinery to ensure they're not introducing more problems than they're solving. You think that menu item should use slightly-different wording? Great, let's change it ... but we need to make sure that it doesn't break a partner solution, or cause a localization issue, or make the product harder to understand by novice users.

Learning what it's like to work at scale has been the most eye-opening thing about my new job. And, in truth, it was a big part of what drew me to the position. My contributions to our 2008 release notwithstanding, I've never shipped a shrink-wrapped product before, and I figured it was a skill well worth learning. (And not "learn" in the sense of "I understand, conceptually, how this process is accomplished", but rather "learn" in the sense of "I've got mud on my face and shredded clothes after crawling through the rainstorms and razor wire of getting the thing out the door.")

Hence: Gavin Shearer, Program Manager, MacBU.

I expect the next few years to be incredibly fascinating.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 19, 2007 8:47 PM.
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December 13, 2007

Office 2008 Released To Manufacturing

It's official: Mac Office 2008 has been released to manufacturing. The product launch is January 15 at Macworld.

(And, I know I uh, work for MacBU and all that, but I really like the software.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 13, 2007 7:15 AM.
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November 19, 2007

You're A ... Program Manager?

On Saturday, I participated in a panel at the UW Business School with two other alums, talking to prospective MBAs about b-school in general, the UW in particular, career options and experiences for MBAs, and so on.

(Fun fact: this group will be the MBA class of 2010, which makes me feel fantastically old. Yikes.)

When we got to the part where I talked about what I do for a living, I saw a few furrowed brows - people 'get' that I work for Microsoft (and work on the Mac), but they didn't really understand a) what the heck a "Program Manager" is, b) what that job is all about, and c) what the heck an MBA is doing in the role.

In fairness, Program Management isn't a typical career track for MBA types. And, as it happens, I've been having this conversation - or flavors of it - with friends of late, many of whom want to know just what the heck it is that I do in my job, and how it differs from Product Planning.

Hence, this post.

When I started in Planning as an MBA intern, I typed up a quickie essay ("You're A Product ... Planner?") to explain what I was doing with my summer:

Put succinctly, planners help guide product evolution. ... We generate new ideas, identify trends, keep an eye on competitive products, and try to help provide thought leadership on products. We are, in effect, the "voice" of the customer.

As a Planner, it was my job to help the product team figure out what they should be building. In day-to-day terms, this meant tons of travel and customer research - in-person visits, focus groups, customer councils, surveys, you name it. Planners spend a lot of time in the field, trying to getting a sense of what's going on in the market. Planners work with people in the product team (e.g., Program Managers, Developers, Testers, Designers), as well as the marketing department (e.g. Product Managers) and executive groups to help get the people who build the product aligned around what the customer wants to buy. Planning is a job with lots of strategy, market-segmentation, analysis and number-crunching.

In other words, it's a classic MBA gig.

For me, moving into Program Management meant taking a step forward; rather than working with the product team to define requirements, I work on the product team, designing features, writing specifications, and trying to build a product that customers will love.

At a high level, Program Managers do two big things: they write specifications that govern how the product will look, work and behave, and they manage the schedule to ensure that all the various parts of the team are working in a coherent, consistent, rational way. Probably the best definition I've ever seen of what a Program Manager is/does comes from Jim McCarthy, author of (the excellent) "Dynamics of Software Development":

Program Managers are the team members who perform the following functions:

• Lead the definition of a winning product.
• Lead the evangelization of the product's vision.
• Lead the team to predictable victory.

...Program Management is a technical track, and there are two aspects of technical mastery: (1) the technology with which the product is created and (2) the technical aspects of leadership in creating software, which is mostly the topic of this book. Program Managers must master the many arts of cajoling, facilitating, inspiring and demanding excellence and effectiveness from the rest of the team. They must know the ins and outs of actually shipping software on time. They must apply the best practices that yield the definition of great products and healthy technology. And finally, they must be spokespeople to the team, to the press, to customers, and to the corporate hierarchy.

So, yes, Virginia, Program Management isn't a typical MBA job. In fact, a lot of my PM peers around the company tend to be fairly technical folks with CS degrees.

Truthfully, as a lifelong geek, the technology side is really interesting; one of the best things about working at Microsoft is that you get to work with a lot of advanced stuff (and, being a Mac developer, I get to work with a lot of advanced Apple stuff). But at the same time, tech doesn't exist in a vacuum; customers don't buy technologies, they buy products, and if you want someone to buy your product, you better be doing something with that product that they find interesting or valuable.

And you know something? An MBA can be an awfully useful thing for figuring out what those "interesting" or "valuable" things might be. Which, I daresay, is a Good Thing. I like to think that my geekiness made me a better Planner, and I'd like to think that my MBA will make me a better Program Manager.

Does that help?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 19, 2007 12:01 PM.
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October 29, 2007

MacBU Nerf Fight!

So I came in this morning to find a Nerf N-Strike Maverick on my chair with a note:

Thanks for all the great work so far! Take time to have some FUN as we gear up to track down the remaining show stoppers on the way to shipping. HAPPY HUNTING!

Turns out that most of the people I work with got 'em, too.

So now the hallways are filled with flying Nerf bullets, and MacBU looks like a John Woo film. People are laughing their butts off.

Craig bought extra ammo. I caught him muttering something about "equipping the rebels."

(Days like this, I really, really, really love my job.)

PS - DUCK!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 29, 2007 11:09 AM.
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October 27, 2007

Notes From My Quickie Trip To Los Angeles

This week's work trip to Los Angeles was an in-and-out affair; I touched down at LAX Tuesday evening and was back at my desk by 2 PM Thursday. Fast, fast fast - a far cry from some of my more involved trips as a Planner.

The usual (but somewhat abbreviated) trip notes:

• It's damn exciting to see light rail going in at Sea-Tac. The station along 99 has been built, and the tracks are now being put in place from that station all the way to terminal. Opening Day 2009 is fast approaching, folks, and it's going to be great when it gets here.
• So there I am, sitting at Gate D2 and doing a bit of e-mail, when I look up and spy today's USA Today ... with an iPhone sitting on top of it. All by itself. I was so surprised that I actually did a double-take (did someone forget their iPhone?!?!?), and then had the "candid camera" moment. After deciding that it wasn't some kind of SeaTac police sting thingy, I decided to get the phone out of plain sight and see if the owner came back for it. Twenty minutes go by ... no owner. I'm beginning to wonder if the poor sod is on Flight 2300 to Singapore right now, cursing him/herself for forgettting the phone, and I'm also wondering where SeaTac's lost and found is. A bit later, a guy shows up with a slightly-distressed look in his eyes: "Seen an iPhone around here?"
• (I must say, witnessing their reunion was a bit touching.)
• I'm still amazed at what people will talk about - very publicly and loudly - in an airport while on a cell phone. I personally overheard product plans, the outcome of a rather contentious board meeting (the guy was swearing so much I thought I was in an episode of Deadwood), Google AdSense response rates, how hard someone was working (and how his boss better not give him any more work, thank you), how hard someone was not working (and how she thinks her boss is figuring it out), and sex.
• (Really.)
• I got to LAX, snagged the shuttle to the rental car center, and proceeded to have another suboptimal Avis experience. The poor folks were swamped with customers, so, by the time I get to the front of the line it's been a good wait. The lady behind the counter checks me in, and then fixes me in the eye to deliver some bad news.
  

  Her: "I've got, like, 10 or 12 cars in front of you for cleaning, washing and delivery."
  Me: "Uh ... how long is that going to take?"
  Her: (Unconvincingly) "Uh, 20 or 30 minutes."
  Me: (Looks at watch). "What else you got?"
  Her: "We have a sixteen-person passenger van."
  

  
  And thus it came to be that I was tooling along the 405 in something that could hold a soccer team or a church group - possibly at the same time. It's big, it's bulky, it's underpowered, it steers like the Titanic. It's also, as you might imagine, a nightmare to park and has horrible visibility.
• (But hey, at least I'm mobile.)
• Microsoft was kind enough to put me up in the W Hotel. Holy cow, it's nice. There you are, dear traveller, tired and exhausted from your recent trip. You've checked in, made your way to your hotel room. You slide the keycard into the slot, hear the "cheep cheep" to let you know the door is unlocked, and the door swings open. Inside, the room is lit, music is playing. Things feel tasteful and calm. You stand, slack-jawed, at how nice everything is. No fumbling for light switches, no smell of mold, no hunting for a remote control to turn on the TV for some background noise. You just step in to the environment, and you're home. Fantastic. Apple does "out of the box" experience better than anyone in electronics; W does "out of the box" better than anyone in the hotel business.
• The California wildfires are, if anything, bigger and scarier than the national news is conveying. Local news is dominated by it, and the sheer volume and scale of the thing is boggling.
• The W's hotel bar has super-tasty club sandwiches and fries.
• Back at LAX, I was again reminded of how people will talk about anything on their damn phones. This time, some blowhard was name-dropping Celebrities He Knows (George Clooney, etc.) to get something out of the person on the other end of the line. Sheesh.
• The Starbucks' at LAX don't offer iTunes integration just yet, which seems odd to me, given that LA is Ground Zero for the recording industry.
• With the exception of a few persistently cranky kids with generous lungs, the flight back to Seattle was one of the most pleasant I can remember taking in recent memory - fast, comfortable, courteous people. We even arrived 20 minutes early.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 27, 2007 11:22 AM.
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October 23, 2007

Off To LA

I'm heading to Los Angeles for some Microsoft business until Thursday; I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 23, 2007 1:55 PM.
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August 24, 2007

Kid In A Candy Store

(Big thanks to my colleague Alex, who inadvertently suggested the title of this post in a recent e-mail to me: "I assume you’re like a kid in a candy store right now." Damn skippy, I am.)

Today is the close of my first two weeks on the job at MacBU. And, so far, it's been a pretty cool trip (aside from being sick for the last two days, which were absolutely no fun at all).

A few notes from my experiences thus far:

• Welcome To Bizarro-World, Part 1: We're in a standard Microsoft building, but the walls are positively plastered with Apple paraphernalia: you've got your "Think Different" posters, your ads for the 30" Cinema Display, Mac Office product shots, iMac promos from the late nineties, you name it. To put it mildly, this is not something you'd see decking the halls of my former building.
• A lot of people outside of Microsoft believe that there is a single, unified "company culture" that governs behavior, regardless of the product/team/division they're working for. Now that I'm in the middle of my first intra-company job transfer, I can tell you confidently that this is not at all true. Different teams have their own cultural microclimates, their own sense of what's acceptable or not. MacBU, for example, is a heckuva lot more sarcastic than Office. People sass one another a ton around here, and I was (briefly) taken aback when I got my first full dose. (Of course, since my sense of humor is All Sarcasm, All The Time, I'm pretty much in heaven.)
• For many of my coworkers, MacBU is their first Microsoft job - they took the gig because they wanted to work on the Mac, and they stayed for the culture and the opportunity to work on products they like. A good number of folks in MacBU also seem have built their entire Microsoft career working here, switching positions intra-BU (moving from test to program management, for example). Unsurprisingly, a lot of them are full-throated Mac fanatics.
• Welcome To Bizarro-World, Part 2: I'm no longer the "the Apple guy" on the team. Used to be that whenever Apple had something going on in the news (iPhone, new iMacs, stock options scandals, whatever), I'd have co-workers pop by my office to chat about it (in a sort of, "Hey, ask Mikey, he'll eat anything" kind of way). Here, everybody is the "the Apple guy/gal" so the conversations tend to be Mac shorthand: "Hey, I just saw this on TUAW", "Did you read Gruber?" and so on. Dropping a Phil Schiller reference in meetings gets you the knowing smile, rather than the puzzled brow-furrow.
• The Office Product Planners threw me a going-away party last week, which was a terrific send-off (and, truthfully a little sad). Their bon-voyage pack included:
  • a framed (and fake-signed!) photo of Steve Jobs;
  • a mock black turtleneck (perfect for my first MacWorld product demo, I assume);
  • a copy of "The Power Of Cult Branding" (Apple is mentioned about a zillion times);
  • an old "MacUser" t-shirt (!);
  • a gift card for the Apple Store.
  What's hysterical is that the Jobs photo is proudly displayed in my office, and absolutely nobody I work with bats an eye at it. Too funny.
• (And, hey, Planners - I'm gonna miss you guys.)
• We have a lot of Mac hardware around here. My colleague David Weiss did a photo tour of our (amazing) Mac lab last April, and its' every bit as cool as it looks from the photos.
• (Yes, I've got cardkey access to the lab. No, I can't let you play Marathon in there. Sorry.)
• Coolest new thing about the job: getting to play with Leopard and Office 2008 every day.
• Worst new thing about the job: not being able to talk about what it's like to play with Leopard and Office 2008 every day.
• (I'm getting really good at saying, "Well, uh, that's covered under NDA, so I can't really discuss it" to my friends.)
• MacBU has an Xbox, Xbox 360, and a Wii for employee use. Rumor is that there's a Wii Bowling league around here.
• We also have an old-tyme popcorn machine, which seems to generate a lot of activity around 3 PM.
• Wednesdays are "work late nights" (we're trying to ship Office 2008, as you may have heard), and the company is kind enough to supply Jamba Juices in the afternoon and free 6 o'clock dinner for everyone sticking around.
• Welcome To Bizarro-World, Part 3: Not to state the obvious, but Microsoft is a Windows-centric environment. And nothing, repeat nothing, will remind you of that like trying to navigate our internal systems on a Mac. Lots of our internal tools require the installation of an ActiveX control; others need .NET; still others prefer (or require) Internet Explorer. None of this is very satisfying when you're running Safari on OS X. I do have a PC on my desk for just this purpose, but it's a very Stranger-In-A-Strange-Land kind of feeling.
• Welcome To Bizarro-World, Part 4: I'm spending a lot of my time getting up to speed on being a Mac Program Manager - learning how to use our internal bug-reporting and tracking tools, reading and reviewing specs, dogfooding new product. But of course, this also means that I'm spending time spelunking Mac OS X from a developer (rather than power-user) perspective. I'm getting more acquainted with Apple frameworks and technologies, because, you know, we can actually build on them. It's fascinating to spend time looking at technologies and asking, "How can we use this in the context of Office?" I don't actually consider a lot of this to be "work" in the classic sense - I mean, I used to spend weekends doing this kind of stuff for fun.
• (Not that I plan to mention that at review time, or anything.)

I fully recognize that I'm in the honeymoon period around here, and eventually I'll be whining about this, that and the other damn thing. But for now ... kid in a candy store, indeed.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 24, 2007 4:15 PM.
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August 14, 2007

MacBU, Day Two: The Top Ten

I'm at Day Two here on the Mac team, and my "Hey, I'm Gavin, and I'm new here" e-mail went out this afternoon. I'm starting to feel all official n' stuff.

However, along with the usual biographical information, I threw together a quick Top 10 list - in this case, of things the new guy (fresh off the boat from Office for Windows) promises not to say while working on the Mac team.

('Cause, you know, I'd look, uh, pretty silly if I did.)

So without further ado:

The Top Ten Things The New Guy From Windows Office Promises Not To Say In The MacBU
10. "Where's the Start menu on this thing, again?"
9. "Wow, that Spotlight and Dashboard stuff sure looks a lot like Vista."
8. "So, why isn't there an Intel Inside sticker on this machine?"
7. "Man, I can't believe you can't use a two-button mouse on OS X."
6. "Anyone know why my Zune isn't being picked up by iTunes?"
5. "Yeah, I don't know what's wrong with my Mac. I think the registry got corrupted."
4. "We design for college kids and hipsters, right?"
3. "Oh, those guys can totally fail. Remember the Newton?"
2. "We make Office for MAC?"
1. "...and I'm a PC."

(Did I miss anything?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 14, 2007 3:21 PM.
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August 10, 2007

Travel, Day Four: Phoenix, Seattle

Wednesday and Thursday were both travel days, and, thankfully, I'm now back in Seattle, back in my neighborhood, and, very shortly, back in my own damn bed.

It's still bizarre to think that this week is - more properly, has been - my last as a Planner, and that, come Monday morning, I'm starting the new new thing.

On the other hand, given some of the indignities suffered this week in the pursuit of customer feedback, well, I might be ready for the change.

The notes:

• Our second stab at getting the heck out of Pittsburgh was more successful than the first. We arrived at the airport, slid up to the ticket counter, were informed that our flight was on-time, and checked baggage. (I about fell over in shock.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 1: Our original tickets were on United, and, when United couldn't get us to Houston anytime before the Bejing Olympics or the second Clinton Administration, they were kind enough to book us on a rival airline - US Airways. On the plus side, US Airways has a direct-to-Phoenix flight (read: doesn't stop in Chicago), which meant that our chances of actually arriving seemed high. On the negative side, US Airways already had a pretty full plane when it took us, and they clearly knew they were dealing with people who hadn't chosen to do business with them in the first place. This meant we got, um, interesting seats - those fun middle jobbies that are situated somewhere behind the tail or just over an engine. I think my seat assignment was 26,000D. If we wanted out of town, it was going to hurt.
• (And, of course, my ability to upgrade - that little sliver of hope - was nil. US Air and United share a first letter in their names, but not frequent-flyer programs. Pity.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 2: Of course, we got picked for security screening. Of course we did. And not just the 'ol pat-down-and-wand routine, but the full-on bag search, replete with the chemically-treated paper, the turning on of the laptop, the works. TSA was totally professional and pleasant, but ... man.
• I'm convinced that the food contracts for every airport in the country are handled by the same company. I was strolling around the dining choices and saw, well, all the same stuff I saw at SeaTac or Chicago or Denver - Qdoba, Quiznos, McDonald's, Ben & Jerry's. And all of it was right next to the CNBC/Hudson News place, just down the way from the Rosetta Stone kiosks. I suddenly felt like Ed Norton from Fight Club. Seriously, the only way I know which airport I'm in half the time is by the school/pro sports team printed on the sweatshirts/mascots for sale at the gift shops.
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 3: And then, the storm came in. And not just any storm, but a fantastic, noisy, rainy, near-biblical-flood-inducing, thunder-and-lightning extravaganza that just shut down the airport, stalled flight loading at the gates, the works. It went on like that for 45 minutes, too. And I was honestly baffled/impressed - I mean, what else could happen?
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 4: Didn't have to wait long to find out. Lightning struck the plane next to ours. Both planes were parked at their gates, and when the bolt hit, it made a sound like God snapping His fingers, or something, and scared the holy bejeezus out of some poor woman who was near the other bird. The entire concourse shut up - silence fell very eerily and quickly - and when the US Air announcer came on, she announced that the plane was out of service pending mechanical inspection. (And some people headed for San Francisco were decidedly not happy to hear that.)
• Eventually (and filled with survivor's guilt), we boarded.
• US Air has this "calming" video they play on the airplane's video monitors while you board. It's unbelievably cheesy, too - think "scenes of nature set to music you might hear while getting massaged" and you're in the ballpark. We're talking waterfalls, helicopter shots of rock formations, microscopic views of crystals and/or plants, and - my favorite - some random computer graphics sequence that that looks like a laser show for Pink Floyd's The Wall. The intent is to keep us docile, but instead it made me giggle.
• (The CD and DVD are available for sale, too. I'm swear I'm not making this up.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 5: We get on the runway, and then - another storm! We're sitting around for 40 minutes or so, waiting for this squall to pass. I'm bouncing in my seat, obsessive-compulsively flicking through lists on the iPhone and hoping like hell we're not next in line for the lightning strike. US Air pops on the "calming" DVD like it's some sort of video Prozac. I start giggling again.
• Storm passes, engines start, we're airborne. It's bumpy - the air's full of pockets - and suddenly it occurs to me that I'm getting married exactly one month from now. Like, almost to the hour. <Keanu>Whoa</Keanu>.
• (Elaine, I miss ya, baby.)
• As luck would have it, I wound up sitting next to a fascinating guy, a Pittsburgh native who wanted to talk about software, Generation Y, finding good talent, the health care mess (he's in the industry), urban planning, national politics, and queuing theory. I was in heaven.
• During my fascinating conversation, US Air interrupted the "calming" video to play "Spider Man 3," whose plot, near as I can tell (no audio), was that a computer-generated sand monster and computer-generated black goo monster both had it in for Spider-Man, who himself was largely computer-generated. Stuff blew up, Tobey Maguire looked sad and lost, and James Franco clearly had his eye on a piece of land, or something, because he clearly had other things on his mind. Frankly, the whole thing was so CGI-slick, over-the-top and pointless that it made me yearn for the good old days of ASCII art.
• Phoenix, Arizona, was 102 degrees Fahrenheit when we landed. At 8 PM.
• Our reservations for the evening were at the Phoenix Hilton, which is - and I'm being totally honest here - a kick-ass hotel. Say what you will about the misadventures of Ms. Paris, but the Hilton hotel people have it together when it comes to building oases of air-conditioned, clean-white-linened, white-wine-equipped fantasticness. Holy crap, I needed that hotel.
• As suggested by the 102-degrees-at-8-PM thing, Phoenix during the day is hot. Hot, hot, hot. Really damn hot. People love to say things like, "Yeah, man, but it's a dry heat," to which the only appropriate response is: go stick your head in an oven.
• If you have ever have lunch in Phoenix, there's a pizza joint called Nello's ("In Crust We Trust") that's pretty damn good.
• Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix has the most over-the-top, overbuilt rental car center you can imagine. It's huge. I daresay you could fit two or three regional airports inside it, and still have room for your CD collection and a family of four. It's also really remote - I actually think we went in to Nevada to return the Impala to Avis. It's absolutely crazy.
• Yes, Avis really did give me an Impala. Stop laughing.
• Good news for geeks: Sky Harbor Airport has free WiFi and decent numbers of A/C power plugs. W00t!
• Our United flight back to Seattle (by way of San Francisco) was - yes- delayed. I'd have been more surprised if it hadn't been.
• Turns out our flight was on "Ted", which is United's low-cost hipster brand that's intended to compete with Southwest. The most interesting thing about Ted is that people who work for Ted talk about Ted in the third person, like Ted is a real person who has preferences. The airline safety video, for example, says, "Ted wants to remind you..." and "Ted hopes you enjoy your flight." (It's creeeeee-py.)
• Incidentally, the Ted safety video is the hippest safety video I've ever seen. It's got cuts, zooms, tons of greenscreen work, a hipster soundtrack. Crazy. Since when does Michael Bay do airplane videos?
• In the first break of the day, our United flight from SFO to SeaTac boarded ... on time. And the nice man behind the counter offered me ... an upgrade. I just about hugged him.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 10, 2007 1:43 AM.
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August 7, 2007

Travel Day One (And Two, And Three): Pittsburgh

I'm traveling this week, doing a string of customer visits in Pittsburgh, Houston and Phoenix (and if you guessed that I was careful to specify air conditioning in my rental cars, you'd be right). I took off from SeaTac yesterday afternoon, and am now safely ensconced in my second Pittsburgh hotel.

(There is a story here.)

The usual notes:

• It does seem somewhat fitting that my last week as a Planner would be spent in the field. I tend to think of air travel as one of the defining hallmarks of Planning, much like dirty fingernails on mechanics or overuse of "air quotes" for MBAs.
• Despite all the news hysteria about how bad it is to fly right now, I assumed (somehow) that I would be immune to the ill effects of the American airline industry, nature, and every other factor that could operate on me. Silly man. United loves Chicago, and when you fly United to Pittsburgh, you stop there. Chicago is, under good conditions, a busy airport ... and Monday did not offer good conditions. Weather was spotty, flights were late. In fact, by the time we arrived (an hour overdue) the "C" concourse looked like a refugee camp. I stood in line at Starbucks next to a woman who claimed to be on her 24th-straight hour of travel. (She looked like it, too.)
• Thankfully, the connecting flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh was delayed as well, so I had some time to charge the 'ol laptop before resuming air travel. Chicago, like LAX, has sprouted some wicked-cool, Verizon-sponsored banks o' power plugs in their concourses. Fantastic!
• I know I'm late to the mobile e-mail party and all, but can I just say how fabulous it is to have e-mail in the pocket at all times? I mean, it's not a big deal usually - at work or in Seattle, I'm never far from a browser - but when I'm sitting on an airplane, chilling out for that 10 minutes of dead time between "plane is docked" and "plane is actually unloading people," it's great to see what's been going on in my world.
• The O'Hare-Pittsburgh flight got under way about an hour and 15 minutes after scheduled departure, and then proceeded to sit on the tarmac for another hour. The United people were wonderful about everything - fetching beverages, letting people use the restrooms, that sort of thing - but after the 25(!) flights in front of us had taken off, we were still nearly 3 hours overdue from our original time of arrival.
• The "original time of arrival" was 11:30 PM Eastern.
• Yeah, I was tired.
• Magazines slayed: BusinessWeek (x2), MacWorld, Wired, Entertainment Weekly.
• The Avis people apparently read this blog. After hearing me rail on about the crappy minivans and Kia whateverthehecktheyares I've rented from them in the past, they decided to saddle me with a Mercury Grand Marquis this time around. This is a big 'ol hunk of American steel, with stylin' that's right out of a 70s Blacksploitation flick. This isn't a car you drive as much as a boat you sail. I think we got a good 4.5 gallons per mile.
• If there's a chunk of freeway in the Pittsburgh area that's not under construction, I'd like to know where it is.
• (Construction is doubly fun when you're dead tired and sailing your 1982 Pimpmobile of Death around unfamiliar freeways at 2:30 AM.)
• Pittsburgh really knows how to make an entrance. After 30 miles of freeway and general dead-of-night blackness, we shot through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, and were dazzled by the city's spires, light, buildings, and bridges. Truly a wonderful sight.
• (Of course, it could have just been the fatigue.)
• First words out of the hotel clerk's mouth when we appeared: "Wow, I'd given up on you guys. Usually 3 AM is the cutoff for people making good on their reservations."
• 6 hours later, we were visiting with customers. And drinking lots of coffee.
• If Portland (Oregon) and Dallas had a kid, it would look a lot like Pittsburgh - bridges and water everywhere, but muggy as hell and a little too hot. Ugh.
• Our business conducted, we were back at Pittsburgh International this afternoon and subsequently (cheerily) informed that our United flight to Houston (by way of - wait for it - Chicago) was delayed, which was going to screw up our connection. The time they could get us in to Houston would be (very) late Wednesday morning. Since our Houston meeting was now off the table (we had 'em for early Wednesday, and were going to Phoenix later that day), we elected to get new tickets direct to Phoenix, hole up at the Airport Sheraton and look for some local flavor.
• "Local flavor" in this neck of the state seems to be confined to strip malls. We found a chain steak place and downed some iced tea and an okay sirloin.
• There are no sidewalks anywhere.
• I'm officially feeling that special kind of punchy-tired I always get after a lot of flying and not enough sleep. (I couldn't sleep last night at all.) At least our flight cancellation means I can get some sleep tonight.

More later.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 7, 2007 5:34 PM.
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July 26, 2007

Switching To The Mac(BU)

As of August 13, I'm starting a new job here at Microsoft. I'll be a Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU - pronounced "Mac Boo"), working to help design and build the next generation of Microsoft Office for the Mac.

I can't even begin to express how thrilled I am.

When I've shared this news with people over the past few days, I've received one of two responses. They are:

1. It's about damn time. Pass the sugar.
2. Whaaaaaaaaaa? I thought you liked Product Planning!

I'll take each in order.

First, it's no great secret that I'm a longtime Apple fan. I won't bore you with the usual discussion of my bona-fides, like when I got my first Mac (1990) or what model it was (SE/30); suffice to say that I've been doing my Amateur Apple Pundit Thing on this blog for a good three years now, and the company is clearly a passion of mine. I like their products, like their focus on the customer experience and think they're producing some of the hottest stuff in the industry right now.

MacBU is the largest Mac development shop outside of Apple (the Seattle PI did an article on the team a few years ago, called, "The Mac Lovers Of Microsoft"), and our flagship product is Mac Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, and Messenger). So if you want to have an impact on the software that a lot of Mac users use (which, uh, I do), Microsoft is an excellent place to do it.

Second, I do like Planning. I've been "living the dream" in Office - doing an interesting job with great people - since I connected with the Product Planning team as an MBA intern in 2004. Planning has been nothing but nice to me, generous with their trust and their resources. I've learned a lot, met wonderful folks, and done some work that I'm very proud of (and which you all will be able to see when Office ships next).

So why change?

Well, I've seen Microsoft VP Robbie Bach speak on more than one occasion, and whenever he talks about career development he invariably talks about building your "portfolio of skills." Broadly, this means you should look at what you do and don't do well, what parts of the company you have or have not worked on, and so on. In Bach's view, it's smart to do a 360-degree analysis of your skills, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and plug the gaps by trying new stuff from time to time. He counsels you to go give yourself experiences that seem interesting (work abroad, do a stint in sales, dabble in operations, etc.), and that pull you out of your comfort zone.

I find this model compelling. One reason I went to business school was because I wanted to try working for a big company. Office Product Planning was my first taste of that, and the experience has been well worth having. But as time has gone on, I've found myself yearning to own more and more of the product, take things from idea to execution, bring new stuff to market. It's something I've done in a startup context, but never with, you know, serious budgets and millions of customers. And of course, if I'm going to build something, I'd like to be building something I'm emotionally invested in, that I really care about. In my world, that really boils down to Internet stuff and/or Mac stuff.

Hence, I've been sniffing around the MacBU for a good while now, doing informational interviews and generally making a pest of myself. I heard earlier this year that the Program Manager gig might be coming, and, when it got posted, I went for it - submitted the resume, did the interviews, the works.

And now, well, you're reading about it.

I'm jazzed. Just .... jazzed. Jazzed about the job, jazzed about the Mac, jazzed about learning new skills, jazzed about getting to work on products that I'll have in my Dock. Jazzed that I'm going to get paid to attend things like MacWorld and WWDC, jazzed that my primary work machine is a MacBook Pro, and jazzed that I'll need to partition it for the Leopard beta, cause, you know, I need to know about that stuff for work. But mostly, I'm jazzed that I get to work on crazy/cool new software ideas that will, undoubtedly, keep my brain running full-speed.

Drawbacks? Yeah, a few. Elaine and I just finished moving (Megaproject #1), and all of this happened a lot faster than I thought it might. In my mind, any kind of job transition was going to kick off after we got back from our honeymoon in September. This would let us use the summer to plan the wedding and get married (Megaproject #2), and then figure out what to do, career-wise (Megaproject #3). But life kind of has its own schedule. This came up early, I realized I wanted it, and the tumblers all clicked. So #3 happened second, and my summer is going to be even nuttier than expected.

One thing I've been particularly impressed by is how open the process has been, internally. My lead and I had our mid-year career discussion back in February, and I told her I was planning to make a play for a Mac job if one became available. We've kept in touch on the issue over the last few months; I let her know that the job was getting posted, let her know when I applied, and so on. Being transparent has helped both of us plan for a clean, clear transition. Planning has been nothing but great about all this - Microsoft's got a strong commitment toward keeping people in the business, and working on projects that make 'em want to get in to work every morning.

(Which, uh, this does.)

So I'm winding down my Planning activities, transitioning my work to others, and, as I understand it, my MacBook Pro is on order. And about two weeks from now, I'll be reporting to work in Building 115.

Watch this space for details.

(Jazzed.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 26, 2007 9:16 AM.
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July 19, 2007

L.A. Story

(With a happy nod to Steve Martin's genius movie of the same name)

Work has brought me to Los Angeles for the past two days, which was much less in-n'-out than Oklahoma City (e.g., I was on the ground for more than 24 hours), but still didn't provide the kind of free time I need to see the sights, kick back, and enjoy a little vacation.

Plus, it's not like I'm ready to just run around like a frat boy at Daytona Beach: customer visits can be exhausting, mentally and physically, and by the end of a good half-day or day-long session, I've generally got a hard drive full of notes and a head full of cotton. Back to the hotel, sleep, repeat as necessary.

And yet, it was still a lot of fun. To wit:

• Our hotel was The Standard in downtown Los Angeles. It's a total hipster joint, all sly/snarky wall coverings, clean white formica, plastic chairs, huge televisions, fluffy pillows, Bang-and-Olufsen knock-off CD players, beds on the floor, that sort of thing. The hotel rooms themselves are One Big Room; the bathroom is one corner, and separated from everything else with floor-to-ceiling glass. This, coupled with the low bed, makes the room feel huge. It's Euro as hell, and I loved it.
  
  The Standard is also home to a hip-and-happening open-air bar/lounge/dance club/swimming pool (no, really) on the roof of the building. It's something you have to see to believe; there's nothing quite like being 130 feet in the air, smack-dab in the center of tall, twinkling, glass-and-concrete buildings at 10 at night, surrounded by the Beautiful People, listening to techno, and holding a glass of wine in your hand. (Big, big thanks to my friend - and native Angeleno - Adrian for the hotel recommendation!)
• The heat in Los Angeles makes me miss the endless gray of a Pacific Northwest February. I'm a mammal, not a reptile.
• I got to drop in and see Heidi for a while, who is doing fabulous, looking fabulous, and took me to a fabulous sushi place in Hollywood. Seeing good friends is just the thing a guy needs after getting off a plane a couple hours beforehand.
• LAX, the good: Los Angeles International unveiled fifty AC-power charging stations, salted around the airport in every terminal. This is, for obvious reasons, great news. Hopefully, someone at SeaTac will get a clue.
• LAX, the bad: the place still looks unbelievably run-down. And let's not even talk about the carpet or the baggage claim.
• Our appointment on Wednesday wrapped up earlier than expected, so the three of us found ourselves back downtown, blinking in the sunlight, and not too-terribly-shagged out. So we did what any three red-blooded American rejuveniles would do, and hit Disneyland.
• (Don't even try to look surprised.)
• We zoomed down I-5 to Anaheim (aside: I know it's passe to bitch about LA traffic, but, for the record, LA traffic really suuuuuuuuuuuuu-[breath goes here]-uuuuuuuuuuuucks), got parked at the garage, hooked up with Tony & Andrea, and proceeded to go on a full-on, full-throated, park-hoppin' rampage of the E-tickets: Soarin', Screamin', Tower of Terror, Space Mountain, Indy, and Buzz. It was a lot of walking, a lot of waiting, and a lot of fun. It was also phenomenally exhausting.
• In a strange quirk of the calendar, this Afternoon Of Disney Park Craziness took place two years and one day after Khan, Christine and I attended Disneyland's 50th anniversary.
• Obligatory iPhone reference: I sleep like the dead, but the iPhone's built-in alarm clock was loud enough to rouse my tired, dragging behind from an extremely comfortable bed and get rolling this morning. (And said alarm was considerably more reliable than the hotel wake-up service, which was 13 minutes late.)
• Starbucks' new breakfast sandwiches aren't rolled out broadly in Los Angeles yet. As one who's become addicted to them on busy mornings, I found that to be a real downer.
• My flight back to Seattle wasn't slated to fly until the evening, but I got to the airport soon enough that I hoped (prayed?) I might catch an earlier flight. No luck - United's Seattle-bound flights are booked solid, a function of overbooking and a cancellation somewhere else in the system. Thank God for widely-available AC Power (see above) and some T-mobile WiFi goodness.
• Rather than tell you about the actual flight home, I'll just ask: when did planes become airborne day-care centers? Inquiring minds want to know.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 19, 2007 11:33 PM.
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July 17, 2007

OK Is OK

This is a travel-for-work week, and I'm writing this while zooming across the country (and, regrettably, deepening my carbon footprint).

First stop? Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

As the presumptive soon-to-be home of the Sonics and Storm, I've been intensely curious to see what the local vibe is all about. Sadly, this one is in-and-out (next stop: Los Angeles!), so I won't have the opportunity. Pity.

As usual, a few notes:

• I've officially turned in to one of those travelers I used to mock – you know, those people, what with their Super Premier Frequent Flyer Pass, their special security lines, their early boarding, free in-flight wine and complimentary hot towels. You know something? I love it. If I have to fly (and Planners have to fly), I want to fly like this.
• (Despite this, I have no plans to start bitching about taxes or voting Republican.)
• SeaTac airport has a power problem. There – I've said it. The Port of Seattle needs to get themselves a calendar, figure out what year it is (it's uh, 2007, chaps), and install some freakin' AC power outlets in the concourses. Today, everyone with a laptop (at last count, 92.55% of the population) is forced to do the Chicken Walk, strutting up and down in the waiting areas, head jerking up and down and side to side, trying to spot the one column or wall with AC power. It's embarrassing. I propose we immediately move forward with a crash program to outfit all available walls with six-prong AC power jacks. In the meantime? Power strips with 10' cords. It's a start
• I always store up grunt work to do on the plane – processing notes, dealing with e-mail, things like that. I never feel very creative (I mean, you can't exactly sprawl out with some table space and put your papers everywhere), so I'm stuck doing data processing. In its own way, it's really satisfying because a) you get to tick things off your list and b) you use a different part of the brain.
• At 35,000 feet, I slay unread magazines by the dozens: a month's back issues of BusinessWeek, two Wireds, Entertainment Weekly,Business 2.0. Take that!, magazine backlog! Ha!
• More on being part of those people: I note with some interest that the first-class cabin has a passenger: attendant ratio of 3:1, which results in lovely service. The coach cabin, by contrast, appears to have a ratio of 3,000:1.
• This ratio bothers you less after two Jack Daniels and Diet Coke.
• Apparently, the point of flying first class is to get loaded. I actually didn't drink on my first leg (Seattle – Denver) because I wanted to get some work done. This seemed to puzzle the attendants, who gave me increasingly-funny looks as I asked for ice water or Diet Coke. I could almost hear them muttering “sucker” under their breath.
• Our flight from Denver to Oklahoma City was delayed an hour, so the group of us hit the Wolfgang Puck in DIA's B Concourse, and enjoyed a damn tasty BBQ chicken pizza. Definite recommend.
• The Oklahoma City Airport is a bit high on Oklahoma, in a “don't mess with Texas” kind of way. The place is festooned with banners, signs, and announcements talking about how great the state is, how beautiful it is, etc. It's sort of small-town-boosterism (I half-expected the Mayor to personally greet us at the taxi stand), and I find it totally charming.
• We walked out of the airport and straight in to good old-fashioned Southwest swelter. 79 degrees and high humidity at 11:30 PM. Mmmmmm…. Took me right back to living in Dallas in the summer of '97.
• Learn from my mistakes, please: don't ever, ever, ever let the Avis people foist off one of their crappy Kia minivans on you. They're big, they're clunky, they've got all the nuance of Richard Simmons in drag. Leave them be. Rent a taxi if you have to.
• Let us now praise the Hampton Inn, with its clean rooms, efficient counter people, free wireless and overall got-its-shit-together-ness. I loves me these hotels, and I stay at ‘em whenever I can.
• Playing Snow Patrol through the speaker of your iPhone is a great way to make your hotel room not feel as lonely at midnight, when you're a bit out of your time zone, can't sleep, and and replying to mail that's queued up over the last nine hours.
• 7 AM in Oklahoma City is like 4 PM on the hottest day of the year in Seattle. Air conditioning, anyone?
• Everyone is really, really, really friendly here.
• If you're going to get stuck at the airport, I recommend Oklahoma City's. It's nice, it's clean, it's modern. And they have lots of power plugs.

I'm off to Los Angeles. More soon.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 17, 2007 2:22 PM.
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June 5, 2007

Way To Go, Richard!

My good friend, longtime business partner, best man at my wedding and all around great guy Richard has just accepted a hot new job.

With Microsoft.

(Yes, those were flying pigs you saw last Friday.)

First, the job: Richard is going to be a Senior Analyst with Atlas, a Web analytics company based here in Seattle. It's one of those kick-ass jobs where he gets to apply his love of stats, knowledge of the Internet, and overall business hoo-ha to a lot of really interesting problems. In short, it's perfect. And it's in the International District, as well, which means he can a) have great Chinese for lunch every day and b) avoid crossing the 520 floating bridge like the rest of us software stiffs.

Ah, yes. So. Software. See, Atlas is owned by this little company called aQuantive, and aQuantive, as you may have heard, was just bought by Microsoft for roughly $6Bn.

What makes this funny is that Richard, more than any other person (save maybe Khan), has sworn up and down over the years that he would never, ever, never, ever, really, honestly, no-I-mean-it work for the Evil Empire. Part of this stems from the fact that he's a lifelong Sun fan (I mean his license plate says, "SOLARIS" ... and it's not a reference to the George Clooney film), part of it is that he's a Mac guy, and part of it is that, well, he just doesn't, uh, love Windows. Richard has had a lot of fun with me (especially on Confab) since I got my job here in 2005, and now that he's employee 1,228,945 (or whatever), well, I guess it proves that you Never Say Never.

Dude, I'm thrilled for you. Welcome to the Collective. Way to go!

(But expect a lot - and I mean a lot of cheap jokes over the coming months and years.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 5, 2007 10:48 AM.
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May 8, 2007

Introducing ... The OFone!

Spoof videos, as a general rule, are hard to do well. Capturing the right tone of the thing you're spoofing - without being too obvious, too mean, too weak, or too "me too" (see: 99% of the "Get A Mac" parodies out there) is a challenge.

So I'm pleased to report that this latest spoof - the "Microsoft OFone" is fantastic - just a perfect blend of breathless product-launch video and clueless crappy-tech product. The marketing guy, in particular, is genius:

This is more than thinking outside the box. We're nowhere near the box! The box is on Saturn ... or Jupiter ... whichever is farther away.

We showed this, apparently, at the Mobile and Embedded Developer Conference in Vegas. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

(Tip 'o the hat to Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 8, 2007 9:53 AM.
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February 4, 2007

Europa, Europa

I'm off to Europe for customer visits this week (I'm actually writing this from mid-air, having just passed over the Mississippi a few moments ago). The plan initially takes me to Munich (again), then zooming around Germany, staying in Switzerland for two nights, and finally coming home for the weekend. I'm hoping for some time to sightsee, but the odds are slim: it's the busy time at work, and I'm on deadline for a few projects. So, much as I'd love to grab some local cuisine, take a walking tour, and snap some local color, I suspect it'll be hotel room service, a bit o' jogging on a treadmill, and a full-tilt broadband connection.

Ah, well.

(The good news is that Elaine and I are taking much-needed time off at Disneyland shortly after I get back. That's a real light at the end of the tunnel, let me tell you.)

Should be a crazy week; I'll update when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 4, 2007 12:36 PM.
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December 19, 2006

Product Planning: Traveling The World, So You Don't Have To

It's been a bit since I've posted about my job (my last entry was September 21st), and, as Elaine and I have been on the holiday party circuit these last few weeks, I've been seeing a lot of old friends. Many of them have asked me:

"Man! What's the deal with all the travel? What are you doing in all these crazy places?"

I can't talk about any specific projects, of course, but mostly I travel to meet with customers.

Planners in Office generally spend between 20% and 80% of their time in the field. This is driven, in a very literal sense, by the need to hear the "voice of the customer" when you're trying to figure out what to do with the product. You can read all the analyst reports you like, sift through articles in journals and magazines, chat with the sales force, get the opinion of the smart gal down the hall, whatever - but when that product finally ships we're going to ask some bloke/blokette to pull money from their wallet in exchange for a small, flimsy disc with bits encoded on it. If we haven't addressed what that person wants in the product, well, the money will stay in the wallet. Which is, as you know, a Bad Thing.

So we go ask 'em. Directly. And my job is to do a lot of the asking.

(A quick side note on the 'romance' of air travel. When I first got my gig in Planning, I was really excited about all the travel opportunities the job would afford me - 'see the world on Bill's nickel' and all that. My friend Joanne, who did a tour of duty in Intel's Marketing department, rolled her eyes at my naive enthusiasm and informed me, bluntly, that I would be "sick to death" of the travel thing in no time flat. While I'm not as sick of it - yet - as she clearly is, I have been to Europe four times in eight months, and, I'll admit, Jo has a point. By the end of October, the very thought of sitting on another airplane was making me want to blow my brains out. Props, Jo - you called it.)

So, you might be asking, how do we go about finding the customers we want to talk to? I mean, we don't just get on the airplane, fly to Dallas (say), and start pestering people for feedback. (Right?)

At a high level, the process works like this:

• First, we start with an 'area of interest'. An area is usually a set of customers that have a need we suspect is being under-served (or inadequately served) by our product today. 'Areas of interest' come from everywhere - previous research, customer requests, internally-generated ideas, you name it.
• We then investigate a few of the most promising areas to learn a lot more about 'em. Mostly this consists of secondary research (the journals, articles, analysts, etc.), where we try to understand who the customers are, who the competitors are, the economic opportunity, strategic value, and so on. At the end of this process, Planning has produced a report and a set of PowerPoint slides to explain to the product team and executives what we think, what we recommend, and why. (Basically, this boils down to figuring out the best way to spend our resources.)
• Once we decide to move forward with a given area, we begin talking to customers to round out our research and start generating new insights. This kind of customer research usually starts with phone interviews, but if we find customers who are doing things we think are interesting (or that are representative of what we're hearing from others), we'll try to get out and visit. One thing I love about this kind of research is that, as Planners, we're not usually talking to them about our product, per se, but rather about the problem they're experiencing. We learn more about their jobs, their challenges, and what annoys them. It's like the old adage, "People don't buy a drill - they buy a hole in their wall." We try to make sure we're selling holes. If the drill is the best way to do it, fine, and if not, we'll find a better way of doing it. (Talking about the drill too early is a deadly mistake, because it locks you in to limited thinking.)
• Once we put together a slate of customers who are willing to talk to us, we then schedule the trips around the customers' schedules. The meetings themselves are always interesting - people do the craziest/coolest things with our software, and when you go on-site, you get to see it in action. Customer visits give you the flavor that a phone interview cannot, helping you to understand how technically sophisticated the customer is (many are not using the latest stuff), cultural differences (Germany vs. Japan vs. the States), how their organization is put together (matrix/hierarchy, open/locked down), how they like to work. Planners will snap lots of pictures on these visits, collect documents (we call them 'artifacts') and, of course, ask lots and lots of questions.

Oh, and yes, it's all covered under double-super-secret NDA, so we can't spill what we learn or see. And neither can they.

I have to say, the customer-contact part of my job is among the most rewarding things I get to do. Customers are often very excited that we're listening to what they have to say, and frequently they are quite glad to have us sit down across from them and take (copious) notes on what we can do better. For me, the reputation of the "Microsoft arrogance" was one of the things that died almost immediately after I arrived on the job. Everyone I work with internally - the product team, the marketing team, developers, testers, you name it - cares very, very much what people have to say about the product. It's a human thing, right? People want to work on something good, and excellent. The team wants to build something people love.

So we ask what we can do better.

Actually, in that vein - I dig visiting with customers who don't like us very much. (I've had a few of these so far this cycle). I get to listen, find out what sucks about our stuff, and then take that information back to the people who can actually do something about it. Microsoft can feel like an indifferent monolith, and I've encountered folks who feel very personally angry at us ... largely because nobody listens to them. So we show up, we listen (hard), and - boom! - people are suddenly very willing to help us. It's cool.

So that's what I've been up to. Research, research, research. If I've done my job correctly, the product team has been supplied with lots of good, representative data that they can use to build the next product version. I've seen some prototype designs of these past few weeks, and they're amazing - I get all tingly. These won't ever see the light of day, as currently designed - they're "concept cars" for software, and we still have to see how expensive they are to implement - but it's quite something to see six months of your life distilled into some realistic-looking Photoshop mockups that, truthfully, get it. As Keanu would say ... "Whoa."

So, yeah. Lots of travel. Lots of phone calls. Lots of report-writing. And it's all so, you know, the product has a chance of kicking some ass when it comes out the door.

More travel in the new year. Let's see if my spirits stay high, huh?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 19, 2006 10:27 PM.
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November 21, 2006

Back From Detroit

I'm home from Detroit, the Motor City, where I had a quickie, out-and-back business trip (I left Sunday morning, and got back just after midnight this morning, so you do the math).

The usual:

• I'd never been to Detroit before, and was very much looking forward to seeing such an important American city for the first time.
• (I also half-expected to get shot while leaving the airport, waiting for the rental-car shuttle, driving on the freeway to the hotel, checking in to my room, getting breakfast the nex-, oh you get the point.)
• Owing to United's (retarded) service options to Detroit (I loves me the miles, but there is no way in hell I'm going from Seattle to Detroit by way of Washington, DC, folks), I took American. It was a great experience, and I'd recommend them to anyone.
• American Airlines Service Example #1: The first leg of my original flight got delayed, which screwed up my connection. American phoned me about an hour before I left my place to let me know, and promptly found me alternate service on a flight that ran through Dallas. While I'm not crazy about out-of-the-way connections (see United's "Washington, DC" strategy, above), the overall impact was less than 2 hours, and I went for it. They didn't need to call, and I appreciated the courtesy.
• American Airlines Service Example #2: I got placed in the forward bulkhead row on the flight to DFW, which meant I was sitting opposite one of the flight attendants in her strap-in-and-hope-we-don't-crash seat. We got to talking, and next thing I know I'm getting an audio tour of the best-selling "Flight Attendants Gone Wild!", where we learn the ins-and-outs of the business, which airlines get their 757s with the cheap options (hint: they're not in business any more), and how the hierarchy works (she's been in the business 21 years, and still isn't sure she'll get Christmas off, if that tells you something). She was great - super-nice, super-funny, super-friendly.
• I'll never be curt to a flight attendant ever again.
• (Not that I've ever really been curt - I'm not a curt kind of guy - but if you heard as much about some of the un-bee-lee-vah-bahl in-air asshat behavior as I did, you'd give up curtness, too.)
• I feel a strange, special affinity for DFW - probably because I lived in Dallas back in '97. I can't explain it, but I find something about the ticky-tacky cowboy-hat Texas tourist crap kind of endearing, and it makes me smile.
• I may like DFW, but the place needs a few more power plugs. Personally, I'm all in favor of a National Power Plug Program, not unlike our highway infrastructure programs from the '50s. Let's get a plug under every seat, and free WiFi in every concourse. Mobile travelers, unite!
• Detroit is COLD. Cold, cold, cold. Like, 30. It's better than the monsoon we've had going on in Seattle all month, but damn. Brr.
• Can I just say that every single person associated with the Avis rental car company in Detroit was incredibly friendly and helpful? I mean, they were enjoying their jobs in a nearly Children Of The Corn kind of way. I mean it, too - our shuttle driver, the counter check-in folks, the security guards. Everyone was smiling.
• (Surprise! Despite my crazy fear, I did not, at any point, see or hear gunshots. I gotta give up watching RoboCop reruns on late-night TV ("Old Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crime...").
• I woke up at Oh-Dark-Hundred (Pacific Time - Detroit is EST) and turned on the TV to help get up. This was, in some regards, a mistake -- I found myself looking at Nickelodeon, which was playing some appalling cartoons and even-more appalling commercials. Boy, oh boy - kids' advertising is horrible -- it's pushy, it's loud, and they sell, basically, crap. It could be crap sugary cereal or crap plastic toys or crap video games, but it's all crap. I honestly see why parents feel under siege by the cereal, toy, and game makers.
• (That said, you couldn't have pulled me off the GI-Joe and Star Blazers cartoons when I was a kid. "Hurry, Star Force! There are only 48 days left!")
• Once on the road to our first appointment, we drove past the swankiest, coolest thing ever - a drive-through car wash that had been converted into a drive-through Starbucks. What was really great about it is that it had clearly been a double-barreled car wash at one time, but they only modified one half of the operation. This, among other things, lets you look at the cars going through the wash as you wait for your Americano. Why doesn't Seattle have this? We should add one to the Pink Elephant!
• Architecture: Seattle has the Space Needle, Chicago has the Sears Tower, and Detroit has the GM Tower - all cylindrical, metal, glass, shining, modern, and ass-kickingly cool.
• Detroit is a border town - 'cept the border is a river. It's kind of cool to be in a town where you can see Canada across the water.
• Note to Lame-Duck Congress: We should not, under any circumstances, build a 700-mile wall on the Detroit River.
• Detroit is actually a very clean city. We didn't see much trash, the drivers were reasonably polite, and, overall, I was impressed with the feel of the place.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 21, 2006 2:36 PM.
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September 21, 2006

Back From Virginia

I'm home again, having just returned from a four-day jaunt to the great state of Virginia. Like my trip to Arkansas, this was a first-time visit for me. (Product Planning should consider "Traveling the world ... so you don't have to!" as our unofficial motto.)

My (as per usual) random trip notes:

• I caught my flight out on Monday and connected through Salt Lake City. We flew in under bright, gorgeous sunlight - and all I have to say is just ... wow. The city proper isn't much to look at, but the mountains are fantastic and the Great Salt Lake itself will take your breath away.
• "Munich" is about a half-hour too long, but still a really, really excellent movie. Rent it.
• Washington Dulles airport is big - three runways, a fourth under construction. The architecture is very much late-1960s-chic, what with the swooping, sloping roofs and big vertical windows. However, the thing that struck me as really funny was the airport signage: it all uses the same typeface, which is this all-caps, futuristic, Buck Rogers-esque thing (see photo, above). It's fantastically kitchy, and I bet it felt sooooo exotic back in 1977 or whenever it was put in. Today it looks, well, like Gil Gerard is going to battle the Draconians with the help of Twiki and Dr. Theopolis. (On his way to Atlanta, apparently.)
• Oh, another Dulles bit - the guy who did the voice for the "Passengers should be aware of their bags at all times..." message on the overhead PA system sounds exactly like George W. Bush.
• (Given that Dulles is the primary airport for Washington, DC, it might actually be him.)
• (Wouldn't it be really funny if that was some kind of unpublicized Presidential tradition? Like, Bush I did it, then Clinton, and now W. I know the sitting President does a recording for their audio-animatronic figure at Disney World's "Hall of Presidents" - so there's precedent. Hm...)
• It's super-disconcerting to see freeway signs for "Manassas." To us West-coasters, "Manassas" is one of those places where a battle got fought a loooong time ago. It's an eighth-grade-social-studies word. Seeing a freeway sign for it just freaks me out - kind of like when I was in Boston, and walked the Freedom Trail with Cintra. (The East coast: where the history comes from!)
• The Hyatt people have really got this revenue-maximization thing down to a science. (Bastards.) In addition to their rooms being fairly spendy (even at corporate rates), they charge you for every damn thing they possibly can. Fitness Center? $5. Internet access? $10 a day for WiFi. Want to use the PC in the hotel business center? $0.79 a minute, with a $14 minimum. If I wasn't so shocked, I'd be outraged. As the old saying goes, at least they could kiss you first and buy ya dinner.
• (I did shell out for the fitness center. A fella's gotta stay in shape on the road.)
• I packed my Cingular GPRS card, and thank God for that. The hotel wireless was incredibly slow, so much so that they might have been using CPIP on their WAN. I don't mind paying for WiFi (well, I do, but that's another story), but I expect it to be of some quality when I'm paying my - er, Bill's hard-earned dollars for the priv. The Cingular card saved my bacon (which it seems to do a lot).
• Gina and I were e-mailing, and she asked me how the weather was in Virginia. I explained that it was (apparently) nice outside, but in the hermetically-sealed, climate-controlled environ of the hotel, I really couldn't tell. Sad, but true: all my business happened in and around the hotel complex, so there was no need to go outside at all. I felt like one of the characters in "waydowntown" (bad flick, great idea) who realize that they don't need to go outside for life's essentials.
• Coming home, I connected through Atlanta. I don't know what was going on in Atlanta today, but holy cow it was busy. Lines, lines, lines - people in lines to get in line, where they could wait for another line. That kind of thing.
• I'll say this for the Atlanta airport: they've got cool vending machines. Coke is based in Atlanta, and the airport has these nifty "Coca-Cola Vend" stations - basically, five or six vending machines in a nook that sell just about anything and everything Coke makes. It's kind of a neat, you're-in-Atlanta thing.
• They also have vending machines that sell iPods.
• (I didn't see if they had the new Shuffle yet.)
• Atlanta also has plentiful, available power plugs all over the airport. I'd love to think that this is because they've clued in to the laptop revolution, but instead I think it's to power their compacting trash cans. (Really. The trash cans compact their contents.)
• Somebody - anybody - needs to tell the Delta people that their airplanes stink. You know that vaguely ooky airplane-bathroom chemical smell that you get toward the back of most planes? (The smell that the people in first-class pay so much money to stay away from?) Well, all of the Delta planes I was on this trip smelled like that. The. Whole. Damn. Plane. This, to put it politely, does not inspire any confidence in the overall hygienic condition of the aircraft. Get some Windex, guys.
• "X-Men: The Last Stand" is crap. Total, utter, complete, purile, unwatchable crap. It's playing on both Delta and United these days, so it's hard for me to avoid, but - the first two "X-Men" flicks were wonderful, and then Brett Ratner - whose business card should just read, "Hack" - got involved when Bryan Singer went off to make Superman Returns. The result is a thrown-together, overfull, undercooked film that stars people we liked in the other two. I saw "Last Stand" in the theater and was OK with it, but the second viewing just ruined it for me. The picture blows. (Somebody stop Ratner before he kills again!)
• Seattle - for all its faults, for its megalomaniacal, out-of-touch mayor, its lack of light rail - is a wonderful, wonderful city to come home to. I got off the plane, smelled the air, and felt the knots in my shoulders just let go.
• (Of course, that could also be because the air didn't smell like vaguely ooky airplane-bathroom chemical.)

It's good to be back. But more travel soon.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 21, 2006 11:06 PM.
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September 17, 2006

Back From Bentonville

I'm traveling a lot over the next few weeks, zipping hither and yon in order to talk to customers about Visio. My most recent trip was an out-and-back on Thursday and Friday that took me to Bentonville, Arkansas.

The trip was my first-ever to the great state of Arkansas (I've been through Oklahoma and lived in Texas, but Arkansas has avoided my travel lists up to this point), and I wasn't sure what to expect. Some general notes from the trip:

• This was my first time flying with my shiny new United Premier card. Although the "Welcome!" kit that United sends you contains all kinds of whizzy-sounding benefits, the primary benefit - at least, at my paltry level of Premier-ness - is that you get to board the plane first and, if they have room, they're likely to bump you to Economy Plus. While this is nice, it's a far cry from the exclusive-nightclub feeling that the materials touted - I half-expected to arrive for the plane, have the big bouncer guy lift the velvet rope, and find myself with a martini, surrounded by supermodels, and mercilessly mocking the non-Premier people who can't see me and my Premier pals from behind the one-way glass.
• Not that I'm complaining.
• (Especially about the extra five or six inches of legroom.)
• This "no liquids, gels, or aerosols" policy is really annoying. I usually carry my overnight bag on to the flight with me, and, stupidly, forgot that I had toothpaste, shaving cream, and hair product in my kit. The (very) nice TSA people found the stuff, of course, and gave me the option of a) chucking it, or b) checking my bag with United by going out of line, back to the counter, and dealing with it there. I had enough time on Thursday morning to check the bag, but, in a twist of bad timing, arrived at the Fayetteville airport on Friday night about 30 minutes before my flight and United refused to take my bag. So I wound up chucking my stuff anyhow. (sigh).
• My new work PC laptop died on me while heading out to Arkansas. This is, if you work for Microsoft, the rough equivalent of having your vocal cords removed and then being told to go give a presentation to 10,000 people. Fortunately, I'm a believer in paper backup copies of every travel document, but it does mean that I'm losing my weekend to getting caught back up on stuff I didn't do while on the road.
• The untimely death of the laptop also means I'm back on my much-hated Tablet for the duration of my travels, at least until Microsoft IT fixes my now-dead laptop or buys me a MacBook Pro with Parallels on it.
• (Fingers crossed for the MacBook.)
• Douglas Coupland's new book, "jPod," is really good stuff. I'm a huge fan of Coupland's earlier work ("Shampoo Planet"), but his late-nineties material really started to lose me. jPod is a fine return to form, nailing the zeitgeist of bored, disaffected tech workers with a level of insight he's been unable to bring since "Microserfs." If you're in tech and under 35, read it.
• I bought one of Apple's new games for the iPod - Vortex - through the iTunes Store, and am now hopelessly addicted to it. It's a 3D "breakout" clone with terrific graphics, music and gameplay, and it makes excellent use of the iPod scroll wheel. I ran my iPod battery down to zero because I couldn't put it down.
• (Stupid Apple, making stupid addictive games.)
• Arkansas is really, really beautiful. I flew to Denver and transferred to a regional jet; the flight to Bentonville was at a nice, lower altitude, so I got a great look at how lush and green everything is. It's very much like flying in to Idaho - rural, but not desolate, with lots of shiny new shopping malls and hotels dotting the landscape. The people were very friendly as well. It feels like a nice place to visit for a week or so, especially if you have family or friends there.
• I always forget how shagged out I get when I fly. I got in about half-past midnight on Saturday, hoovered up a good eight hours of sleep, and still felt spooly all day yesterday. I do the usual travel best practices - lots of water, no booze, pack a sandwich, try to sleep - and it doesn't seem to matter. Sigh. The next few weeks are gonna be a marathon.

I'm leaving for Virginia this week, so I'll post when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 17, 2006 12:01 PM.
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September 3, 2006

Guten Tag!

Work is taking me to Munich later this month.

(Munich!)

It's been a while since I've been to Germany. I can hear the guy in the back of the room calling out, "How long has it been?", so I'll just say that the last time I was in Germany, there were, like, two of them. East and West. I was on a five-week bicycle tour of the country with my high school's German club in the summer of '89. We went to Frankfurt, Berlin, Austria, and Munich. I was all of 16, and loved it.

(In fact, I got drunk for the first time in my life in the Hofbrahaus - yes, that one - which, if you think about it, is a pretty killer way to do it.)

So I'm off, dear readers, and, as usual, since Uncle Bill's is paying my freight and, you know, expects me do do actual work while I'm there, I'm not going to have a lot of time for sightseeing or personal stuff. However, I've had good luck with suggestions from the apparently-well-traveled folks who scan this blog on Things To Do When Abroad, so I'm throwin' it to you all - got suggestions of great stuff to do in/around Munich?

(No need to suggest the Hofbrauhaus. That date's in the calendar already, marked in pen, highlighted, underlined, and has pre-empitve beer spills on the page.)

Got any recommendations?

(Nate and Jo: I'll be back in time - just in time - for your nuptials. No worries.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 3, 2006 8:59 PM.
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August 22, 2006

One Year In

Today is my one-year anniversary with Microsoft.

Although the date has been highlighted in red pen on my wall calendar since, well, the wall calendar arrived, I must confess that it still feels a bit like the silly thing snuck up on me. The first month arrived quickly, six months strolled in at its own languid, luxurious pace, but the first year ... well, that rocketed by like something the Japanese commute to work on.

A year is a good chunk 'o time, and around here it seems to be the average period for an employee to find their sea legs. I was told (quite candidly) by one of my fellow Planners that "nobody expected me to be worth anything" for my first year. This had nothing to do with me, he assured me - it's just that the place takes time to figure out, the job takes time to figure out, and nobody expects you to start to get good at anything until after you've had your requisite 365 days.

At the time, I remember thinking that this was all a bunch of let-me-off-the-hook hogwash. I'm pretty driven, and tend to pick stuff up pretty fast; plus, you know, I was an intern, so that should've shaved a good three months off the learning curve. I figured I'd be smacking balls out of the park in less than 180 days, guaranteed.

(Uh, no.)

Damn if he wasn't right.

One year in, and I'm just now starting to feel really competent at my job, having finally figured out some of the critical pieces of how to make Planning my own discipline, as opposed to my brother's, father's, or next-door-neighbor's. I've marinated with things long enough to see the various threads and issues, the longer-term implications of Decision X or Y, and so forth. Learning the business (software in general, Microsoft Office more particularly, and Visio specifically) has been an uphill, every-day's-a-new-one kind of thing. I get why it takes a year.

And yet, coming from the startup world, a year feels like eternity. We've built and sold businesses in three years or less; taking 33% of that time period just to ramp up seems, well, expensive. It's just another reminder that the world of enterprise software is about as far-removed from the scrappy upstarts I've always inhabited as you can get. (Some days, I'm surprised the culture shock hasn't killed me.)

But I'm finding my swing, and that's awesome. One year feels great.

A persistent question I get from friends and coworkers (often after a few beers) is "what's different" about Microsoft vs. a startup. The question is usually asked because people are trying to figure out what they should do in their careers. Often, I find that people perceive their choice as one of two things:

• The small, risky, do-it-for-love company who might just make it big (but whose paychecks might bounce), or
• The big, safe, slow-moving company who offers a steady check but provides zero emotional nourishment.

First of all, I don't think this is a fair choice. Yes, there are big, slow, stupid, lumbering companies who don't know why "Office Space" is funny. Working for these companies probably sucks. Know what? There are plenty of small, scrappy companies who are run by insane people. Small size won't insulate you from bad management. Instead, the trick when finding your perfect work boils down to two things:

• People. The #1 thing that made me choose Microsoft - and Office Product Planning - was the people. Period, full stop, do not pass "Go". I bonded with my interviewers, bonded with the team as an intern. I came back for them. If you like your co-workers and respect your manager, the inevitable weirdness of business will be surfable.
• Subject. You have to find something that makes you want to get up in the morning. If you're doing a job you find uninteresting - even with great people - you'll bet bored or burn out, and then you're off to the next thing. While I didn't know I'd be working on Visio when I took the Planning gig, it turns out that Visio has some interesting problems that need solving. The opportunity to work on those problems does, indeed, get me out of bed in the morning.

That's it - the secret to job happiness, at least as far as I can tell. The rest - title, perks, salary, blah blah blah - is all pretty much dressing. Yes, you should take a job that lets you pay your bills. Yes, you should be compensated at a rate that's at least commensurate with your peers. But taking a job you hate for an extra $20K a year will be a losing strategy, long-term. Go for people and subject.

The other question I get a lot is about what "surprises" me the most about Microsoft. My answer, increasingly, is scale. The size of the machinery in this place is just astounding.

It may seem obvious to say, but in both my previous small companies we were responsible for designing, building and selling our services to the market. The salesperson (often yours truly) would consult with the customer (often another smaller business) about what they needed, and I would then propose a design to meet those needs. Our developers would build the solution in active consultation with me, the customer, and other people who needed to be involved. Not surprisingly, we (usually) built stuff that the customers loved - and why wouldn't they? It was engineered just for them.

That idyllic scenario just doesn't fly in a software company like this one. Visio is booted every day by tens of millions of people. It's used by a huge variety of people for an incredibly broad spectrum of tasks (and, hey - I'm the Planner ... trust me on that one). Some of these tasks are intended ... and others not. The space between the customer and the architects/developers is pretty vast. In the middle, we have layers of sales and marketing professionals (ours), journalists, opinion makers, resellers, partners, and, of course, the customer (the organization who buys the software) and the user (the person who points and clicks with it). That's a huge number of people to have to work with and around, and they're all pretty important to ensuring the success of the product in the market.

That's scale.

(Oh, and let's not forget that this set of relationships exists in every country we sell in - France, Germany, UK, you name it.)

It's a bit dizzying to see the long, long drop from "Cool idea! Let's put that in our product!" to actual shipping and installed bits. And, given my warm, fond memories of my startups, it sometimes feels a little foreign.

But it's the tradeoff, right? The "long, long drop" is the price you have to pay to have a product that's sold into any kind of mass market. And, I must say, it's fascinating to be planning around those kinds of constraints and with this kind of scale.

So. One year in. So far, so good.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 22, 2006 1:52 PM.
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August 9, 2006

Orlando, MGX & Expedition Everest

Gina wrote me on Tuesday with the following:

When were you in Orlando? I was looking at your Flickr photos and it looks like you did expedition everest?

Short answer: yeah, I was in Orlando. And yes, I got to ride "Expedition Everest." But due to the loss of my hard drive, the post I'd worked on that was All About My Trip To Florida wound up getting lost.

So here we go, as best as can be reconstructed from that other storage system called "long term memory."

I went to Orlando on July 18 to attend the Microsoft Global Exchange, or MGX. MGX is a week-long conference for Microsoft's sales and marketing professionals; they fly in from all over the world to see executive presentations, hear about new products, watch demos (MGX is demos-a-go-go), and network with one another. Microsoft rented both the TD Waterhouse Centre and the Orange County Convention Center for the duration; TD Waterhouse is where all the executive sessions are held, while the interactive learning stuff is in the Convention Center breakout rooms.

The scale of the show is just crazy, and the whole thing tends to be a party! party! party! atmosphere (for instance, the closing-night party was at Universal Studios Florida - we got run of the place, including complementary food, drink, and booze).

(MGX has been known to get out of hand - rumor is that Microsoft isn't allowed to book another company function on Maui ever again after one particularly, um, "rowdy" year.)

So I fly down to Florida for the week and wind up staying in the Walt Disney World Dolphin hotel. I'm bunked down with Balu, a classmate from UW, and we're both pretty busy with sessions, meetings, and whatnot. For a Disney geek like me, this is a bit torture-ish: just outside my window I can see the top of the Contemporary Resort and Space Mountain, as well as the top of Everest over at Animal Kingdom. But, lacking time to do much of anything personal - let alone Theme Parkin' - I'm stuck with my nose to the glass, staring into the candy store from the sidewalk.

Ah, well.

So MGX wraps up on Saturday night, people are going crazy at Universal Studios, and I slip out around midnight to head back to the hotel. My flight leaves Sunday night at 6:30, and I've figured out that I've got an oasis of personal time - about five hours, tops - to get up in the morning, pack, and hit Animal Kindgom before I have to get back to the hotel and head for the airport.

And so, on Sunday morning at 11 AM, I'm in the single-rider line for "Expedition Everest", bypassing entirely the 60-minute wait. And, after about 20 minutes of anticipation, I'm through the line and sitting in the coaster, slightly disbelieving that the previous day I'd been watching Steve Balmer hold court in front of 14,500 people at a sports stadium.

Here's the verdict on "Everest": it's good. It's not the best thing I've ever ridden (and it's not the best coaster on property -that's still the "Rock n' Roller Coaster"), but it's a solid addition to a park that needs it.

In many ways, "Everest" is a cleaned up, modern version of Disneyland's "Matterhorn." Both rides have the same general motif (snowy mountain), gimmick (encounter with the Abominable Snowman and the Yeti, respectively), and ride mechanism (both are roller coasters). The difference, of course, is 50 years; where the Matterhorn is the first-ever steel-tube coaster in the United States (and looks it), "Everest" is a clean, smooth, well-balanced, modern thrill ride. Just not too thrilling.

And that's the point, I think, for Disney. This coaster is supposed to be fun enough for the teens, but not too scary or intense for Mom, Dad, and Little Gav. They've succeeded on that score - it's a coaster with street cred, but not too much attitude.

I rode it twice, and then I was done. With a few hours still remaining on my personal shot clock, I upgraded my ticket to a Park Hopper and zoomed over to Epcot to ride "Soarin'." A 75-minute (!) wait later, I was flying over California. (And grinning like a madman - I love that ride.)

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. And if you want the pictures, check out my Flickr photostream.

(PS - if you've ever got the opportunity, going to a theme park by yourself is a ton of fun. Single rider lines reduce your wait, and you feel like you've got run of the place. I'd forgotten how great it was when I did my day at Magic Mountain in 2004.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 9, 2006 11:25 PM.
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August 1, 2006

Guaranteed Ride Home

Last night was a late one at the Empire - a system I manage broke unexpectedly, and needed some emergency TLC to get back on its feet. By the time I'd wrapped up with my obligations, it was 11:30 at night.

The last 545 to Seattle leaves Redmond at 10:44 PM.

Now, it's down a ways on the Microsoft Benefits list, but "Guaranteed Ride Home" is one of those things you don't think about until you use it. In English, it means that if you carpool, vanpool or bus to work - and can't get home using same because of working late - the company will put you in a cab at their expense.

A cynical person might observe that this policy is just a way for the company to keep its employees past their dinner time (and that's certainly true). That said, it's still a nice, comforting thing.

(And let me tell ya, the inside of a taxi never looked so good.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 1, 2006 6:23 PM.
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July 19, 2006

Wanted: Visio Customers

One of the tools we Planners use to understand how to improve our product is a Customer Council. In my case, this is a group of dedicated Visio users who are selected based on how well they represent the overall Visio customer community. There are a limited number of Council member positions, and members serve for a period of one year.

Council members are uniquely positioned to have their voices heard by the designers and developers of Visio. Members can provide feedback on proposed features and interact, face-to-face, with the Visio product team. Council members share their views in person, through regular conference calls, and in electronic mail.

I am recruiting for the 2006-2007 Visio Council right now.Since I know a number of my readers are dedicated Visio users (I mean, I am the Planner for the thing), I'd love to chat with some of you to see if you're a good fit. If you are interested in helping shape the next generation of Visio, we'll ask you to:

• Participate in monthly conference calls with the product team;
• Come to Redmond at least once a year to attend an in-person, two- or three-day Visio Customer Council Symposium;
• Review and provide detailed feedback on proposed feature designs;
• Install, use, and provide feedback on Visio beta software;
• Respond to questions from the product team via phone or e-mail;
• Host Visio product team members at your place of business from time to time to understand more about how you and others at your organization use Visio;
• Sign a nondisclosure agreement with Microsoft.

If this sounds like something that would interest you, please contact me by (work) e-mail (gavins [at] microsoft [dot com])!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 19, 2006 5:16 PM.
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June 16, 2006

Boston, Day Six: Waiting To Fly

My final day in Boston is being spent, largely, at Logan Airport.

I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, with this whole getting-home business. My regular flight is scheduled to leave at 7:20 PM, delivering me home to Seattle (by way of Chicago) around half past midnight. Since I don't have any remaining business in town, I thought (naively) that I'd pop out to the airport, go standby, and slide in to something departing around 1 or 3 or something.

Uh ... no dice.

Silly me. I totally forgot that, you know, TechEd is ending for everybody, and, of the 12,000 people who came to the show, a good chunk of them work for Microsoft and are also trying to get back to Seattle. So the flights are, to put it mildly, clogged. Filled. Packed to the rafters. (Pick the cliche you like.)

Actually, I think the poor counter workers have it the worst - they keep announcing flights and then getting on the PA system to say, "United Flight XYZ to Chicago is completely full - there is no possibility of upgrade or standby..."

(Oh, and hey! If you could get on an earlier flight, United now charges $25 for the privilege. When the hell did that happen?)

So I'm sprawled out in the chairs here at the airport, getting caught up on e-mail (and clearly doing a bit 'o blogging). I've got the usual Travel Entertainment Kit - books, movies, yadda. I'm fine. But it's going to be a long, long day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 16, 2006 12:12 PM.
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June 15, 2006

Boston, Day Five: Half Day

I'm pleased to report that my Thursday was a heck of a lot better than Wednesday.

TechEd kicked off with a brutal 8 AM session (that's 5 AM back in the Real World) by my colleague Bill Morein, who bravely fought jet-lag fatigue to present on the wonder that is Visio 2007. I was late to the session, having woken up hard and then picked a shuttle bus that wanted to go to the Convention Center by way of Texas. (Bill admitted to me later that he'd caught a cab from his hotel to make sure he was on time. The shuttles have acquired a, shall we say, reputation among conference attendees for being, um, er, the slowest way to get between two points).

After catching a two more sessions (on SharePoint and InfoPath, respectively), I scanned the conference agenda for the day and saw ... nothing. All clear. The balance of the sessions were either repeats of stuff I'd already seen, deep-dive technical stuff on subjects I wasn't sufficiently grounded in, or (as was more often the case) stuff I didn't really care about.

So after given that it was lunchtime (and I really couldn't stomach any more conference food), Bill and I decided to cut out, find a pub, and watch England in the World Cup. This was followed by few hours of work back at the hotel, a run, and then dinner out. Bill's flight was scheduled to depart at 6 AM Friday, so we decided to get a late dinner and a drink or two. (We actually got seriously lost looking for Haymarket Pizza, a joint recommended by fellow Planner (and Boston native) Pete Card.)

It was a fitting, low-key end to a long, long week. My TechEd schedule tomorrow is similarly clean, so I'm hoping to sleep in a bit, get an early lunch and see if I can't get out to Logan and standby an earlier flight.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2006 8:45 PM.
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June 14, 2006

Boston, Day Four: Burnout

TechEd is too damn long. It's only Wednesday, and I'm already feeling burned out.

At some point, the steady consumption of all this information causes me to want to hole up for a week and just process. I've seen demos, taken notes, met speakers, and talked to folks at their trade show booths. Now I just need to take the time to find out how to schematicize all of this data so I can make use of it in my work.

(A break, kind sir?)

Nah. Instead, I'm got two more days of the same.

I do like the show, but it's like eating a favorite dinner - the first night is a treat, the second is a happy accident, the third feels vaguely indulgent and lazy. But by the time you've eaten the same thing for a month straight, you're ready to pull out your hair and swear the stuff off for the rest of your life.

(I'm sure there's some kind of Law Of Long Conferences or something that expresses 'attendee information retention' over time, or something - if so, conference organizers ought to design their shindigs so they end at the primary downward inflection point.)

To unwind, Cintra and I decided to walk around Boston and take in some of the local color. As it happens, this is the perfect antidote for a long day of conferencin'.

We started at my hotel and walked to (and through) the Boston Public Garden. It's lovely, picturesque - just a terrific civic amenity. If I lived in Boston, I know I'd spend a lot of time here - either gazing at the water, watching kids play on the swings, or simply seeing other citizens enjoy themselves.

A note on the associated photo: Boston has these painted cows everywhere at the moment, scattered throughout downtown as a form of public art (this is not unlike Seattle's "Pigs on Parade"). One of these, located at the Park Street Station (on the northeast point of the Garden), is the "MBTA Cow", painted with the various transit lines of the city. And, naturally, being the big transit geek that I am, I had to get my photo taken next to the thing. (Big thanks to Cintra, who kept her snickering to a minimum as she snapped it.)

After we dallied in the Garden, we walked north and east and hooked in to the Freedom Trail. This is a 2-mile-long strip of brick and red paint that re-creates the ride of Paul Revere. It's amazing. You walk past Boston's old City Hall (now, sadly, a Ruth's Chris Steak House), past the Old State House (where the Declaration of Independence was read publicly for the first time), the site of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere House, North Church (remember "one if by land, two if by sea?" This is where they hung the lanterns) and ultimately end at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown.

Like my trip to London, this was amazing, overpowering, incredible stuff. It's a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around the enormity of the history (and its importance to our country) that occurred in this tiny piece of the world - and not that long ago. It also made me realize that I should have paid much better attention during history classes in 8th grade - there's lots here I know I'm missing.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 14, 2006 8:04 PM.
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June 13, 2006

Boston, Day Three: The Good, The Bad And The Funny

Tuesday was my third here in Boston, and I've now spent enough time at TechEd to be able to talk a bit about the conference. So, for your reading pleasure, I hereby present some observations/thoughts - the good, the bad, and the funny. In order:

The Good

• Professionalism. The conference is very well-run. The people who put this thing together have clearly done it a whole lotta times, and have taken pains to reduce the stress on the conference participants, in ways both big and small (and hey, when you're managing a six-day shindig for 12,000 people, that's a big deal). For instance, TechEd runs bus shuttles between the "official" hotels and the conference center on a continuous basis. This means attendees don't need to deal with taxis or private cars to get in and out - and is just more efficient, a smarter way to do it. On the other end of the spectrum, each attendee is given a pouch that can be slung around the neck. On the front is your attendee card and name (along with a nice pen); on the back is a "mini guide" to the conference sessions, a map of the halls, and so on. This saves people from looking too dazed and lost as the show goes on.
• Facilities. The Boston Convention Center itself is bright, airy, comfy, wonderful. It's very modern, very clean, well-laid-out, and, again, details are good. They've got lots of nice lounges, for instance, for ducking out and checking mail (or doing some networking); they've also invested in good chairs for the attendees in the conference sessions themselves (which, when you're spending a lot of quality time on your butt, is something to be very grateful for). There are PC kiosks everywhere - banks and banks and banks of them - that let attendees check in with their home office(s) between sessions.
• Sessions (Length). The sessions themselves are the right length - 75 minutes. This allows for the presentation of complex material without feeling rushed, but also keeps things close enough to an hour that attendees' attention spans don't get too tried.
• Breaks. There's a half-hour break between sessions. This is a Good Move, as it gives people time to rehydrate, check e-mail, chat with other attendees, use the facilities and stroll to their next session without feeling time pressure.
• Energy. The crowd energy is great. People are buzzing about the stuff they're learning.
• Sessions (Variety). The available sessions are on a very wide range of topics, from a focus on business problems to deep-dive technical. Since you can jump from one track to another without problem, there's always about three things I'd like to see in any given time slot.
• Diversity. We have lots of international attendees. This makes the conference center sound like the UN.
• Coffee. In addition to the free bottled water and Diet Pepsi, they're serving Starbucks. Thank God.

The Bad

• WiFi. The wireless Internet access sucks. I imagine the poor, poor network is being over-stressed by the digital denizens of the conference, but - geez. It takes my Tablet a good five minutes (five minutes!) to negotiate a connection and get an IP address, and once I'm up the service is sloooooow. Like, "you have time to meet someone, fall in love, start a family and die while waiting for your e-mail" kind of slow. (Did I mention it's slow? It's slow.)
• Food. The food selection is ... bad. Breakfasts and lunches seem to be catered by Satan's Conference Catering Company - inedible bits of overcharred, undercooked, over-boiled or over-oiled ... everything, from the veggies (they do have vegetarian options, which gets points) to the meats. As bad as the "real" food is, though, the between-session snacks are infintely worse - a dizying array of sugary crap that makes you believe Willy Wonka and Veruca Salt are lurking 'round the corner. We're talking brownies, of course, and cookies, but also candy bars and - get this - Hostess fruit pies. Remember those? The ones that have the bad, fake lemon and cherry flavor? Deep-fried and covered in frosting? 5,000 calories apiece? We've got em. And yes, there are one or two lonely apples in a barrel here and there, but c'mon ...
• Narrative. I don't know what it is, exactly, about Microsoft presentations, but we're frequently terrible about storytelling. Terrible, terrible, terrible. While there are some notable exceptions, I'm shocked at how many presentations I've seen so far that jump the shark in the middle. Look, it's not rocket science, right? When you're showing off product, you do the following:
  1. Start by explaining the Problem that faces the audience.
  2. Explain (or show) how the Problem has been solved in the past. This undoubtedly involves much groaning and eye-rolling from the audience, who have cut themselves on this particular piece of razor wire one too many times already, thank you.
  3. Explain (or show) how the Problem is now so much easier to solve with Version 15 of Microsoft XYZ For Enterprise Architects, or whatever. Audience gasps in surprise and squeals in delight as they see that they, too, might be able to pull cash out of their wallet and give it to you in exchange for repeating their previous razor-wire-fraught behavior.
  4. Say, "And now I'll walk you through the steps involved in doing this yourself" and begin the Demo. In the Demo, refer back to points 1 - 3, as needed, to keep the audience focused on what you're doing and why it is going to make them happy.
  5. Complete the Demo, recap 1 - 3, remind the audience that the Problem is no longer a Problem, and thank the audience for their time.
  6. Spread arms in an open-person gesture and say, "Any questions?"
  Without conscious effort and attention on 1 - 6, the presenter will likely skip through 1 - 3, jump right into 4, and begin Geeking Like Crazy, at which point the audience, already mildly lost, will furrow its collective brow and, after five minutes of trying to follow the indecipherable flurry of dialog boxes, Start menu summoning, and IE-window-resizing, will just say, "aw, the hell with it" and check out. Five minutes later, they've got a WiFi signal on their laptops and they're surfing.

  This is happening, way, way too much at this show.

The Funny

• Restrooms. There are a lot of guys at this show - plenty of women, of course, but the Y-chromosome skew is notable. What this means, in practical terms, is that there is always a line at the men's room - and it's pretty long, especially right before or after a session. Ladies, on the other hand, can just stroll in and out of their side of the loo. After years of listening to women friends of mine bitch - loudly - about having to wait in line to use the bathroom at rock concerts, sports games, theme parks (oh, hell - everywhere), I can say that a) I know what you're talking about, and b) it's pretty funny to see the tables turned on a bunch 'o geeks.
• Industry Cattiness. Most of the big tech names are exhibiting their wares here, from Cisco to HP to Intel and so on. Everyone at the booths is friendly and smiling, positive, and nary a bad word is spoken about competitors. The lunchroom, however, is another story - I wound up at a table alongside a couple of guys from Intel who were ragging on Microsoft (and Office specifically!) for a good five minutes or so, at which point one of them, having said his piece, paused, took a drink from his bottle of orange juice, turned his attention to me, and said, "So ... what do you do?" (Yeah, his reaction was pretty priceless.)
• Borg-ification. Every other person has a Treo and a Bluetooth headset to go with it. This makes TechEd look like some kind of Borg convention, and also makes it impossible to tell crazy people (loudly talking to themselves) from salespeople (loudly talking to someone else) at 20 feet.
• Penguins. Microsoft people are all wearing "the uniform" - dark blue shirt, light slacks. While this does add a certain kind of (good) consistency to the show (it looks professional, and makes it easy for attendees to know who to get help from), it also looks like a tech version of "March of the Penguins." We just need some Morgan Freeman narration, and we're good.

Did I mention my brain is full? (And it's only Tuesday? And the show runs 'til Friday?) Four sessions a day will do that to ya. Sheesh.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 13, 2006 7:13 PM.
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June 12, 2006

Boston, Day Two: Starting Work At 8:30 PM

It's 8:30 PM here in Boston, and I'm just now getting to work.

I don't mean that literally, of course - I've been working all day at TechEd, drinking in session after session after session. But now, for the first time, I'm able to sit down and deal with the e-mail, handwritten notes and other random to-do items that have accumulated on my list since I left work late Friday.

I departed the Convention Center around 6, traveled back to to the hotel, scrounged dinner, hit the treadmill for 5 miles (hey, I need some exercise after sitting on my butt all day), showered, and - boom. 8:30.

This may sound like I'm complaining, but honestly - I'm not. One great thing about travel is that it focuses the mind on work wonderfully - there just aren't that many distractions in your hotel room (provided, of course, you can forget the spicy new city just outside your window). Fortunately, one Westin looks pretty much like the other, so that's that.

The conference is great. It's larger than I thought, and produced to the max. Richard was surprised to learn that we've got thousands and thousands of attendees, pursuing seven or eight parallel tracks of material that encompasses presentations, hands-on labs, briefings, keynotes, and a trade show. For someone like me, whose tech background is off the Microsoft stack, it's a lot of new (valuable) information (e.g., what the hell does BizTalk Server do, anyhow?). I'm also meeting great people - other Microsofties, customers, partners. It's fun.

OK, back to work - I really, really want to get to sleep before midnight.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 12, 2006 5:44 PM.
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June 11, 2006

Boston, Day One: Arrival

After an incredibly long day of flying, I'm pleased to report that I've made it to Boston. As always, a few notes from the trip:

• The time zone thing is brutal. To be at the Boston Convention Center in time for the 7 PM keynote, I needed to fly in to Logan around 4 or 5 PM Eastern (that gives time to de-plane, get to the hotel, check in, drop bags, etc.). The only available flight left SeaTac at 6:10 AM, which, working backward, meant I arrived at the airport around 4:15, left my house at 3:45, and was up at 3 AM. Yeesh.
• Denver International (the site of my layover) is a big, big airport.
• The TCBY at Denver sells low-fat raspberry smoothies that are yummy. And perfect for a long flight.
• My connecting flight from Denver to Boston was delayed about two hours. One problem with long layovers is that you tend to spend a lot of time waiting in chairs with a lot of other people who, like you, are similarly delayed. It creates a very "hospital waiting room" feeling.
• Parents: one thing you should never, ever do - in hospital waiting rooms or, God forbid, at Denver International airport when your flight has been delayed two hours - is give your monster-ish three-year-old twins a handful of coins to play with as a way of keeping them occupied. 'Cause, you know, your kids will find the nearest metal surfaces (trash cans, window sills) and will bang the holy hell out of the coins on the metal. Which, when you're a) delayed two hours and b) have been up since 3 AM Pacific, is like having someone fire a nail gun into your head. Repeatedly.
• I'm just saying.
• I finished "The Subterranean Railway" (a book all about the creation and history of the London Underground) while mid-flight. It's awesome. One thing the book makes abundantly clear is that large urban transit projects have the same problems, whether it's the mid-1850s Victorian England or 2004 Seattle. Guess what? People will complain about the project and claim it's a boondoggle. NIMBY's will tell you they don't want it near their house. Nobody thinks it will relieve congestion. And economically, it's going to be a wash for the builder/operator/investor. The city, however, (and its citizens) will get incredible rewards for a long, long time. The other thing about the book is that it makes me want to ride every individual tube line when I'm in London at the end of the month, just to see all the differences in architecture and design.
• (Sound Transit Light Rail opens in 2009.)
• Another good book is "What Clients Love" which was a gift from my good friend Laura. It's a collection of common-sense business wisdom, compiled into a folksy, accessible volume. Some of the advice is the business equivalent of "wash your hands after using the bathroom" and "don't talk with your mouth full", but what makes the book good is its positive, can-do energy - not unlike Guerrilla Marketing (a book I adore, and a book that makes me fall in love with commerce every single time I read it). In this case, when you take out all the tautological The Sphinx stuff (think, "He who questions training only trains in asking questions") you're left with some gems that trigger all kinds of great ideas. (I've got a full notebook of stuff I want to check on and think about.)
• Boston has a light-rail system ("The 'T'"), and it works great. I was able to - wait for it - take the train from the airport to downtown. No, really. And I cost me $1.25. (I think this "train" thing might be catching on!)
• One other thing about Boston's light rail: the airport terminal isn't, you know, actually at the airport. (Gasp!) Instead, you have to take a shuttle bus a quarter mile or so to the "T" stop, at which point you catch the train. The shuttle bus is free, and comes about every 5 or 10 minutes. But you know something? Despite the inconvenience, the train thing still seems to be popular! Amazing.
• Boston feels a lot like London. Same mashup of old and new buildings, same winding, narrow roads, same cobblestone. It's cool.
• Boston pedestrians do not know about, or care about, the existence of pedestrian traffic lights. "Walk"/"Don't Walk"? Never heard of it. Peds are strolling into the streets around here like cows on some far-off rural road in Indiana. I'm amazed that people don't get hit more often. Maybe it's an East/West Coast thing, maybe it's a Seattle thing (Seattleites are famous for observing traffic signals past all reason), maybe it's a me thing (see the point about "Seattleites" and multiply by 3), but I'm astonished.
• After checking out the TechEd keynote, I hooked up with Cintra for pizza and beer at this cool Irish pub near the hotel. We had a great time laughing and catching up - which we'll do more of later this week.
• 3 AM Pacific - 11:30 PM Eastern is a long day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2006 10:13 PM.
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Off To Boston

I'm off to Boston, and will be attending TechEd for the balance of this week. I've packed my camera, but must confess that my schedule is slammed - it's nonstop sessions (and, you know, my usual work) until I get back to SeaTac (on Saturday, the 17th at 12:23 AM, in case you're curious).

Good news: I do get to see Cintra on Wednesday, at least.

I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2006 3:18 AM.
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May 26, 2006

Office 2007 Beta 2 Is Now Available

Oh! One more thing. The new version of Microsoft Office (Office 2007) is now available as a public beta. It's totally hot - I've been running it for months, and have fallen in love with it.

If you'd like to get access to the beta, just click on over to Microsoft.com and register.

Enjoy!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2006 5:46 AM.
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May 22, 2006

Thursday's Town Hall Meeting

If you follow Microsoft news at all, you've undoubtedly heard that we had a "town hall" meeting last Thursday, where, among other things, sweeping changes to our performance-management system were announced. From Todd Bishop's Post-Intelligencer blog:

Microsoft plans to overhaul its performance-review system for employees and make a series of additional changes -- including new perks on the Redmond campus -- in an effort to address some of the biggest complaints from its work force. Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel announced the initiative, dubbed "myMicrosoft," Thursday afternoon at an internal "town hall" employee meeting attended by CEO Steve Ballmer and others.

A few of my friends have asked me what the hoo-hah is all about. In all candor, I'm still a bit too new to the business (9 months today, actually) to appreciate the full scope of the changes. Long-term, prominent Microsofties like Adam and Scoble and Dare have weighed in (as has Mini-Microsoft); you might try them for a bit of old-timer perspective.

At a high level, the changes announced at the Town Hall can be summarized into three buckets:

• First, and most importantly, Microsoft's five-point ranking system - the one we've used for the last 30 years - is gone. While we still have commitments, employees are no longer forced into a distribution of review scores relative to their peers. This seems to be a Good Thing; I'd heard lots of horror stories from seasoned coworkers about how the stack-rank resulted in their getting a effusive, glowing, wonderful review ... and not even a cost-of-living increase. (As a guy who's yet to receive his first annual review, I can't personally relate, but I can say I'd wondered how all that stuff was going to shake out.)
• Second, we're working to improve morale with some inexpensive, commonsense fixes. For example, we're bringing back some perks - like free laundered towels in the shower locker rooms - that had been cut for budgetary reasons. And we're reversing our cost-cutting on things like office supplies (e.g., we'd consolidated our supplies into a few key rooms, making people walk for 5 minutes each way to get a fresh pencil).
• Third, we're adding services to help people preserve work/life balance. We're expanding the hours of our cafeterias (and bringing in some outside firms, like Pagliacci, to improve selection), partnering with day-care/dry-cleaning/auto-detail companies, and just trying to reduce the effort people spend managing their personal lives.

I think this is terrific, terrific stuff.

A lot of these changes will have a material, immediate, positive impact on my working experience at Microsoft. The cafeteria hours, in particular, are going to be a godsend: I'm sooooo tired of eating CLIF bars and pretzels for dinner when I work late. The ability to get something fresh, and reasonably healthful, is a wonderful thing.

I also continue to be impressed with how proactive senior management is. Our leadership genuinely seems to want to listen to people, both as a source of competitive advantage and because it's The Right Thing To Do. A good idea is a good idea, regardless of its source, and our execs are forever asking for input and requesting that people e-mail them. Thursday proves that, given enough directional feedback, they'll make the hard calls (like, you know, like throwing away a three-decade tradition when they feel we've outgrown it). Amazing.

Big picture? Microsoft is, and continues to be, a great place to work. I continue to be astounded by the scope of my benefits, and I'm gratified that the execs are trying to make my life a little easier. As a former business owner myself, I know this stuff is really hard to do, and, for 62,000+ people, not exactly cheap. Bravo to our leaders, especially LisaB.

Now: back to work, people...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 22, 2006 9:45 PM.
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May 12, 2006

Ride The Bus, Get $50

A lot of people ask me about taking the bus to work. Many are surprised ("You ride the bus?"), some are incredulous ("You ride the bus?"), and some are genuinely intrigued. For many, though, interest in taking the bus wanes quickly, as it seems too complicated ("I need to catch the 48 at 7:05, and then transfer to the 7:25 Eastbound 545 at Montlake?"), or like one would have to sit next to smelly people (Dan Savage has recently referred to Metro buses as "rolling homeless shelters").

So, despite the endless (and, IMHO, non-reversible) rise in fuel prices (the gas station at 99 and Denny listed Premium for $3.74 yesterday), people climb into their cars and inch their way along the 520, oblivious to the fact that There Is A Better Way. The save-money-on-gas incentive to give up the 'ol daily grind just isn't enough.

But what if someone paid you to take the bus?

Microsoft, for example, is offering 50 bucks.

Like many large employers, Microsoft is worried about the expense and logistic nightmare that is the Single-Occupant Vehicle. If everyone who worked in Redmond drove to work, the place would be one big, gridlocked mess. So while we employees get free bus passes (which is my second-favorite benefit, by the way, after the health care), and parking is an utter nightmare at fast-growing sections of the company (rumor has it that MSN is now offering free valet parking to prevent employees from burning 20 minutes looking for a space) it's apparently not enough to get people to change their behavior.

Enter bribery.

If an employee takes "alternate transportation" to work (carpool, vanpool, bike or bus) just 15 times between May 1 and June 30, Microsoft will cut you a check for $50. And if we do it 15 more, the city of Redmond will cut another check for $50. (Check out redmond.gov for more information.)

For an already-riding transit guy like me, this is found money. But for many of my co-workers, I suspect this will be the nudge they need to finally try the bus. People are creatures of habit, yes? And it takes time to get new habits, whether that's flossing or exercising or changing our diet or ... busing to work. And sometimes, people need a good reason to break out of the same-old, same-old.

$50? In my book, that's a good reason.

I've noticed, anecdotally, that the buses have been pretty full these last couple weeks. I wonder how long that'll last...

UPDATE, May 6, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 12, 2006 1:40 PM.
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May 1, 2006

Coupla Days Off

PlannerPalooza is over.

The crazy work events of last week have wrapped, the e-mail volume has died down, and, for the first time in a month or so, I'm finding myself unwinding and relaxing.

Oh, and sleeping. Lots of sleeping going on.

Given how many hours everyone was putting in right up to (and during) the forum, the Leads got fairly worried about burnout. As such, all of us have been told not to show our faces at the office this week until Wednesday at the earliest ("and when you do come in, show up around 10, take a long lunch, and leave early") as a way of recharging the batteries.

Sadly, a full recharge isn't really an option for me. My May and June are pretty packed with travel (Chicago, Boston, and London - again!), which has the effect of pushing forward work that I'm supposed to deliver. Plus, I've got some MLR stuff due next week, and I simply must put in the time before things go Crazy Ape on me again.

So. I'm working from home today, which is its own pleasure. Home allows me to focus on things like writing and reading and research, not all of which are often possible (or productive) from the office. I've got papers to edit, proposals to write ... and peppermint tea.

And after the 10-some hours of sleep last night, I even feel fresh.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 1, 2006 10:44 AM.
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April 7, 2006

London, Day Six: The Final

Today was my sixth - and final - day here in London, and after yesterday's fun, the agenda was back to All Business, All The Time: customer visits around town. Eric and I spent some very quality time with a few folks, deep-diving on ways we can make Visio better-suited to their needs. As you might imagine, it was super-interesting stuff. Customers are great - they tell you what they love about you, but they also tell you when your breath stinks. It's an honest relationship.

A big part of me is shocked that I'm outta here tomorrow morning. I've packed most of my stuff already, and need to be up in less than eight(!) hours to get out the door and back home in one piece. In the interim, I've got to figure out how to finish some other work (no sleep for the wicked ... or employees of Microsoft) before crashing, hard, in a short bit.

I've had an utter blast here, and am amazed/gratified that I've got the sort of job that affords me these opportunities. I'm coming back here - guaranteed. (And sooner instead of later.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 7, 2006 12:38 PM.
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April 6, 2006

London, Day Five: Sightseeing

I finally got in some sightseeing and touristy stuff today, zooming around some of London's better-known (and highly-recommended) attractions.

Eric, Richard and I kicked off our day with an English breakfast at a local diner, and then caught the Tube out to the Tower of London.

The Tower is amazing, just wonderful, this phenomenally ancient part of England where the history is so thick it almost suffocates you. We did a guided group tour with one of the Beefeaters (highly recommended), learning about who was interred where, who interred them, and who, ultimately, killed 'em. (The British Royal family, at least from a backstabbin', power-grabbin', do-what-it-takes-to-win standpoint, makes the Ewings from "Dallas" look like the wholesome family from "7th Heaven"). We did see the Crown Jewels, walked the grounds, snapped loads of photos, and finally exited on to the Thames river.

After crawling around (and photographing the hell out of) the Tower Bridge, we strolled down the Thames toward (and across) the Millennium Bridge. Crossing over to the Southside, we then headed for the London Eye.

The Eye is a truly unique experience. I'd heard it described as a "Ferris-wheel-like-thing" by folks, but that really fails to capture what it's all about. Yes, you do go around a circle, from the ground level to 135m above the ground, but you do so in an enclosed pod that holds about 20 people. The pods are comfortable and stable, and give you the ability to walk around inside them for the best view of the city. Since you're right on the river (and overlooking Parliament and Big Ben) you get some spectacular views of, well, everything. The total time to do one revolution on the Eye is about a half hour.

Heading back across the Thames, we got up-close-and-personal with Big Ben (and heard it go off!), then scurried into the Westminster Tube tunnel and zoomed over to Harrod's. If you've not been, Harrod's is a gi-normous department store, covering one entire city block and taking five stories. Inside that structure, they sell, well, just about everything: clothes, furniture, groceries, pets, electronics, you name it. Imagine everything you might find for sale at your local mall, and then put it inside a single business (done up with the level of department-store finishing you'd find at a high-end Macy's or Nordstrom), and you've basically got it. After checking out music, electronics (yes, they sell Macs), and a few other things, Eric split off to head back to the hotel, and Richard and I got a bite in the Harrod's Cafe (serving Harrod's bottled water and Harrod's Chardonnay. Really.).

Richard and I said our goodbyes not too much later, him off to his hotel (and Heathrow first thing in the morning) and me off to dinner with Eric and one of our Microsoft colleagues here in the UK (which was at the OXO Tower, and excellent).

Overall, Thursday was pretty magical. The weather was perfect, the company was stellar, and the people of London are genuinely friendly and helpful. I snapped several hundred photos with my Canon, and look forward to sifting through them on the way home.

Friday's back to customer visits, and Saturday I'm flying home.
(Is the week over already?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 6, 2006 11:31 PM.
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April 5, 2006

London, Day Four: Lost

I got lost in London today.

Well, "lost" is probably too strong a word (I knew where I was on the map), but certainly I spent a good hour of my time wandering around a section of town, looking for a hotel that, as it turns out, was miles away.

Breaks down like this: Richard is in town, having flown in from Italy early on Wednesday. The two of us wanted to hook up for dinner at a pub, so the plan was for me to head over and meet him where he was staying. I got the address, fed it into Google Local, saw the directions, and elected to stroll (it was just 1.2 miles East of my current location, and I was craving the walk).

So I walked down to Strand, and continued along to Fleet, enjoying the views of the Royal Courts of Justice, Old Bailey, and St. Paul's Cathedral. And the whole time, I'm looking around for my left turn, the one the map showed that takes me right to the hotel.

Didn't materialize.

I'm walking up and down the streets, trying to remember the exact layout of the Google map and getting more and more frustrated with the rabbit-warren-esque approach of London's side streets. Many of them look like alleys, and, as night was beginning to fall, I grew increasingly wary of walking down many of them.

So I stopped and asked directions from bike messengers, newspaperman, and others, each of whom (politely) looked at me blankly and (politely) shrugged.

Eventually, I happened upon a guy in a "SECURITY" slicker who was working a gate. I stopped and asked him if he'd heard of the hotel. He hadn't, but he asked his friend, a night watchman, to come over for a second.

The watchman, an older guy with a friendly smile, asked me for the name of the hotel. "Lancaster Gate," I told him.

"Lancaster Gate? Are you sure? That's miles from here!"

I wasn't sure of anything at that point, so I asked him if there was a phone somewhere I might get my hands on to see what was what. He kindly loaned me his cell phone (which was doubly nice, as I had no English coins on me), and I rang the hotel. Sho' 'nuff, it's near Hyde Park. Dammit!

Mr. Nice Watchman then pointed me in the direction of the Chancery Lane tube stop, which, he assured me, would take me straight to the Lancaster Gate tube stop. The hotel was about a 5- or 10-minute walk from there.

The lessons from all this?

• Yes, London is twisty and hard to figure out, especially when
• Google Local will lie to you, and
• Leaving your hotel room without a cell phone in a new town is kinda dumb, but
• Leaving your hotel room without coins for the phone is even dumber, and while
• English Night Watchmen are about the kindest people on Earth (thank you, Mr. Night Watchman!), their kindness goes farther because
• The London mass-transit system rocks.

This last point is the one I really came away with. I was able to get from Point A to Point B at 8:30 at night on an idle Wednesday because of the established, well-publicized transit system that knits the city together. Eric and I got a firsthand experience with that in the morning, too - we walked to a Tube stop, got aboard, popped out at Paddington Station and hopped a train to Reading that departed 10 minutes after we got there. The Reading trip was just 25 minutes, and we found ourselves a scant mile or two from the Microsoft offices (which are super cool, by the way), allowing us to take a cab the rest of the way.

I've been able to get around some pretty vast distances on public transport in this town. What's amazing, too, is the sheer number of London citizens that use it. People in Seattle treat the bus like it's something for other people to use, but here in London the Tube was packed at 11 PM with people going about their business.

The other cool thing about the Tube is that, having seen it (and seen all the stations, and whatnot), I have a much better appreciation for the mood Neil Gaiman was creating in "Neverwhere." I have to re-read that book.

It all ended happily, which is to say, with pints.

(Oh, and the pub Richard and I drank in was founded in 1721.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 5, 2006 10:43 PM.
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April 4, 2006

London, Day Three

Today was the second (and final) day of the Visio conference, which ran until 4 or so. Following wrap-up, a group of us adjourned to a (different) pub (London's economy seems to be composed largely of pubs - the businesses on a given street seem to go pub, pub, hotel, book shop, pub, sandwich shop, pub...), where we unwound and caught up for a few hours.

Speaking of pubs, I've had several people write me to tell me that my <Keanu>Whoa!</Keanu> moment about finding a pub dating from 1727 is not, in fact, any kind of big deal. Jeff e-mailed me (title of the e-mail: "1727? P'shaw"):

Screw that, 1727. That's like a modernist Olive Garden in the Mall. You're in frickin' England, dude.

Danika (who hails from Boston) was similarly unimpressed:

Oh - you Northwestern mods. I've got a haunt back home that dates from 1757.

I'm reminded of that great line in "L.A. Story" where Angeleno Steve Martin is giving a tour of Los Angeles to visiting London-dweller Victoria Tennant. Driving past a number of oversized houses, he quips, "Some of these houses are over twenty years old!".

So, yeah. I'm from a part of the world that's a mite ... newer. Shoot me.

One thing I can't get over is how it feels to walk the streets. This part of London seems to have a uniform building height of around four or five stories, which, combined with the twisty roads and whatnot, gives the whole place a bit of a maze feel ("You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"). Cities like Seattle or Vancouver have tall buildings alongside smaller ones, punctuating the skyline every few hundred feet or so. London, not so much. I'll see if I can't capture a few photos of what I'm talking about.

The rest of my week is customer visits, and - with luck - siteseeing on Thursday. It'll be great to fire up the 'ol camera.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 4, 2006 10:37 PM.
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April 3, 2006

London, Day Two

My Monday was spent at the first of a two-day Visio conference at the MSN offices here in London. I got to meet colleagues from the UK, Sweden, Germany, and other countries where Microsoft does business, and the group quickly got down to business.

Conferences - especially ones where you spend most of your time sitting - are hard. They're doubly hard when you've just flown in from the US, are jet-lagged out of your mind, and need something (anything!) keep your attention focused away from how freakin' tired you are.

Some of my American colleagues started dropping/dozing toward the later afternoon, so Eric and I elected to duck out a bit before things formally wrapped up. We didn't know the exact route back to the hotel, so, in a moment of raw inspiration we elected to go with the Zen Navigation System and see where it took us. The fresh air helped a lot, and not too much later we found ourselves in Trafalgar Square (which, by all appearances, is inhabited entirely by pigeons and tourists). Strolling a few more blocks took us back to the hotel ... and to a nearby pub, which opened in 1727(!).

1727!

You have to drink in a bar that's been open since 1727. It's like a rule, or something. (So we did.)

The place was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a British pub (except the fries are actually good, contrary to rumor). The beer was great, the ambiance was all wood-paneled-charming, the tables were small and intimate. Service was awesome (whenever a bartender calls me "love", I melt).

Hopefully I'll be able to get out an explore a bit more this week. Tomorrow's more conference, but Wednesday looks promising.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 3, 2006 10:23 PM.
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April 2, 2006

Lagging

It's 2:30 AM local time, and I'm up.

I slept a ton last night, but my body finally hit the breaking point and gave me the "enough already!" signal. So now I'm sitting at my desk, cranking on some of the work I wanted to get done this weekend (and couldn't on the plane). I'm meeting some of my fellow Microsofties at 8 AM in the lobby, so I've got five-some hours of productive time and then we're off and running for the day.

Hopefully, I'll be able to last until things wrap up this evening.

(And: thank God for 24-hour room service. The coffee is helping.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 2, 2006 6:25 PM.
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On The Other Side Of The Pond

I've arrived in London, and am at my hotel. A few notes, in no particular order:

• I am very tired.
• Building on that point, London is eight hours ahead of Seattle. That means I've been up almost 23 hours straight as of this writing. I plan to see if I can go a few more.
• Dan Savage's "The Commitment" is a really good book, a personal meditation on marriage (gay, straight), families, and American society.
• The Colbert Report will make you laugh out loud on a 737 (and when you do, people notice and look at you funny). I'll hand it to 'ol Steven - he's polished his right-wing blowhard routine to a high shine, and it's hysterical.
• Despite its terrific trailer, "The Weather Man" isn't a very interesting movie. Pity.
• "Satisfaction: The Science Of Finding True Fulfillment" is also a really good book.
• The latest issue of Business 2.0 has a mention of a kick-ass new Cingular phone, the 8125, that I may have to buy for myself.
• The Boeing 777 is a hell of an aircraft - just a monster widebody thing with loads of room for everything. The bathrooms, for instance, were the largest I've ever seen on an airplane. Ever wondered how there was enough space in an aircraft lavatory for the "Mile High Club"? Wonder no longer. On the 777, you could fit an entire boy scout troop into the bathroom and still have room for a few more.
• United's "Economy Plus" is a godsend to those of us who are six feet or better.
• The United crew on our 777 was super, super, super cool, professional, and helpful. This is a marked contrast to the nasty experience I had with them a few Novembers ago. Mad props to United!
• "Snakes on a Plane" is funny, but becomes somewhat less funny when you're tired, punchy with lack of sleep, and begin wondering if that shadowy shape you see out of the corner of your eye ... IS A SNAKE ON YOUR PLANE!
• Flying into the sunrise - especially after hours upon hours of utter, blackest dark, 7 miles above the Atlantic - is magical.
• Heathrow airport is kinda shabby. Like, c'mon, guys ... spring for some new carpet and a few buckets of paint. The kids'll love it.
• The London Underground is awesome for a transit geek like me. It's not light rail - instead, it's old-school heavy rail. The Piccadilly line took me right from the airport to the Covent Garden stop (a few blocks from my hotel). Total transit time: 36 minutes. Imagine: a rail system to the airport! Unbelievable!
• London's traffic planners have never heard of a "grid." Ever. Or if they've heard of it, they have decided they don't like the look of it - too straight and logical. Instead, the streets here seem to have been inspired by a crayon drawing by some retarded three-year-old who went crazy on a menu at IHOP.
• Which cost me 25 minutes, on foot, trying to find my hotel.
• NOTE: It took me 36 minutes to get within a few blocks of my hotel from the airport.
• My hotel is very hip. My room is like that swank loft on the Haight you always wanted, but could never afford.
• It's also a smoking room ... cause, you know, I'm in Europe.
• London streets are very, very empty at 10:30 on a Sunday morning.
• I am very tired.
• It's now raining outside, which pretty much hoses my naive sightseeing plans. I may sleep sooner instead of later.
• I'm really, really excited to be here.

More as it develops...

UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 2, 2006 4:31 AM.
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April 1, 2006

Off To The UK

I'm heading out the door for the UK, and it feels surreal.

Since I'm gone for a week, I've been doing a lot of the obsessive-compulsive stuff around the apartment ("Am I sure the oven is off? What about the fan in the bathroom?"). I've got a very full suitcase as well as a carry-on bag. With the former, I had to anticipate attire and weather issues for the next several days; the latter is all about not being bored on the 12-some hours I'm in the air.

I feel pretty well-equipped on that end: Daily Show and Colbert Report on the iPod, some DVDs, magazines, and a few books - including a London travel guide.

My flight leaves in 3 hours, and arrives at Heathrow around 8 AM local time. I'm going to try to stay up until "tomorrow" night to get synched with the local clock. Hopefully, I'll have the energy to tool around town and see a few things.

I don't know what my Internet situation is going to be like for the next few days, but I've got my camera and I'll post as I can.

Have a great week, folks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 1, 2006 8:32 AM.
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March 14, 2006

London Calling

Microsoft is sending me to London for a week in early April.

Travel is a big part of the Planning job, because, at a fundamental level, you go where the customers are to see how they're using your product and find out what they have to say about it. In my case, I'm in the UK for a conference and a series of customer visits.

I'm totally, totally, totally excited. I've never been to London before, so this promises to be a very unique experience.

Now, friends of mine who are more seasoned at the whole Corporate Travel thing often equate "travel" with "total pain in the ass" and will, without much prodding, go on a jag about what a drag it is to deal with Airline X, or how Airline Y's executive lounge at DFW totally sucks, or about that one time their luggage got lost while en route to COMDEX, or some damn thing. I don't doubt that veteran road warriors have a good point about travel - and that I might even come to hate it, given enough experience - but for me, right now, travel for work still has that glittering, shimmering, 1960's the-future-is-now kind of cool factor. It just feels so exotic. "I'm off to London," I'm saying (to just about everyone) "for work."

And while it is work (I mean, my calendar has moved from "full" to "packed" in the last 24 hours), I know that I'll have time to See Things - Hyde Park, for instance, is right near my hotel - and this gets me bounce-in-my-chair excited. Elaine bought me a copy of Fodor's "London" book, and I've been reading it on the bus, slack-jawed at all the stuff I'm not going to have time to do. It's staggering.

So. Hyde Park, yes. Harrods, yes. Tower of London, probably. London Eye, hopefully.

Anyone have any suggestions? Is there anything I absolutely, positively must see? (Assuming I can?)

('Cause, you know, I'm off to London ... for work.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 14, 2006 11:04 PM.
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March 12, 2006

Career Planning

Microsoft is hip-deep in the "mid-year review process", which is the time of year when you sit down with your manager, look him or her in the eyes, and tell them what it is you want to be when you grow up. Sort of.

I've written before about Microsoft's management-by-objectives system, where you sign up for a series of deliverables by saying what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and what success looks like when you get there. Once you establish your commitments, you're given a pretty free hand to manage your schedule and resources to make them happen.

Since formal annual reviews (aka, "raise and bonus season") are in the summer, the midpoint review is a way to check in with your manager, go over what you've delivered, and bring him or her up to speed on where things are with your in-process projects. From there, you can have a conversation about stuff that needs work, talk about areas of concern, or raise flags on anything that seems to be a problem. For your manager, the midyear is a vehicle to provide structured feedback about what's working (and what's not), and give you time to make any needed changes before the annual review.

The other, bigger, part of the mid-year review is to talk about your future career plans: aspirations, goals, desires, and so forth. People change jobs a lot inside of Microsoft, and talk openly about the "two to three year gig" on a given project, product or team. One of the things the company emphasizes is "finding your perfect work" - the particular combination of challenge and opportunity that will get you up in the morning. Obviously, this changes over time: you might start life as a Product Manager on XBox, and then move into Business Development over on Exchange. It's important to Microsoft that people make these moves inside the business, sticking with the company for the long term (because, you know, the alternative to that is that we all go work somewhere else). As a result, people tend to be pretty open about what their 3- or 5-year plan happens to be ... even if it's not sticking with their current gig.

I had my midyear about two weeks ago, and it went fine. (They're not telling me to pack up my office by 5 PM or anything.)

For me, though, the strangest part of the midyear concerned my future career aspirations. I've only been in the job, like, six months, right? And when I started here, my ambitions were all about becoming the best Planner I could - with only vague notions of what I might want to do later. The point, for me, was to marinate in the job, learn it, learn the company, and make a decision when the time seemed right.

Instead, I'm already finding myself charting out what I want to do in 2008 or so. Initially it felt ... disloyal, or something, to be talking about leaving Planning at this early date (I just got here!). And yet, as Jeff and I chatted about opportunities, paths for growth, and the like, I quickly realized just how big this place is in terms of opportunity.

For instance. I'm clearly very interested in Apple and Mac stuff, so I've been toying with the idea of going and working in the MacBU - probably in a development role. Office Planning, on the other hand, has an expanding set of opportunities - thornier problems, bigger impact - that seem to align well with my natural interests. And finally, being at a multinational means I could conceivably choose to live and work abroad, setting up shop in France, Japan, or the UK.

And these are just three possibilities.

Clearly, it's a lot of choice. I'm taking my time processing all of it, searching my interests to identify both what I'd like to do (MacBU? Planning?), the kind of work I'd be good at doing (Building products? Marketing them? Managing people?), and the areas I might look at as opportunities for personal growth (New countries? New markets? New products?).

I know this is a Big Question, but I know a lot of my fellow MBA classmates are wrestling with it, too (Cintra, for instance, just made a decision to stay in Boston). So, dear readers - what do you want to be when you grow up?

And: got any advice?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 12, 2006 8:18 PM.
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February 16, 2006

Get Your Work Done

I'm often asked (lately, by MBA friends who are interviewing with us) about how much time I spend at work. There's a widespread perception that working at Microsoft involves, among other things, some kind of Faustian bargain where you agree to give the company your soul - or at least most of your waking hours.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my experience, Microsoft (or at least Office) understands/supports the need to unplug and recharge in order to do the best possible work over a sustained period of time. When I was an intern last summer, I got to attend a lunch with Jeff Raikes. Jeff talked a lot about the need for people to go home at the end of the day, and he encouraged us to volunteer, get involved in our communities, spend time with our families, walk our dogs, whatever:

He talked about how Microsoft seems to attract type-A, go-go-go types (and certainly, MBAs seem to exhibit symptoms of a highly-virulent strain of that disease), but that people will inevitably burn out if they don't have something to keep them going on the outside.

I'm with Jeff on this one. We all spent insane numbers of hours at the office during my first startup, and it destroyed our health, social lives, and worldly perspective. It's not viable to work stupid numbers of hours when you want your business to last (caveat: sometimes, Virginia, you do need to sprint when you're running a marathon - that's not what I'm talking about). So I've learned to set boundaries: generally, my workday runs from 8 AM to 6 PM. I try to catch the 7:30 bus to Redmond, which, when you include the (gorgeous) 1/2 mile walk to my building, nets me out at my desk around 7:55.

That said, I'm damn busy. Not to sound all macho about workload, but I'm delivering six different projects over the next two-some weeks. I've got two(!) pieces of research in the field, am wrapping things up with our student researchers at the UW, have to finish building out the new Planning site, and am also dealing with two other non-trivial internal projects. So my time is very much spoken for. I often feel like I sit down at 8, blink two times, and it's time to go home.

If you want to work at Microsoft, there's really just two skills you need to master (and incidentally, they're identical to the two things you need to master to survive business school).

The first skill is the ability to deliver the goods. Seriously. Microsoft will cut you all the slack in the world if you prove you can get your work done. If you deliver what you said when you said, you're fine. So know what you need to do, and do that thing. Period. If you can get two weeks of work done in 30 minutes, awesome. Go play Xbox and drink Diet Dew. Nobody cares. But if you can't get the ball in the net, you're going to have trouble - no matter how much time you spend at work.

The second skill is time management. This one gets a lot of lip service, but it's true: you're screwed if you can't manage your calendar. This place is a lot like a theme park - the inter-building shuttles even have free candy on them - and there's a million things you can do on campus, from hearing a distinguished visiting speaker, to chatting with colleagues, to drinking the free soda, to playing video games, you name it. All of these distractions will compete for space in your calendar, and you've got to be able to say no to some of them. Otherwise, you'll find the overflow of activities managing you, and pretty soon ... you're not getting the work done. (See point #1 for why that's bad.)

So yes, I have a life. I'm busy as hell when I'm working, but I walk away at the end of the day and come in fresh in the morning. It works great.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 16, 2006 9:12 PM.
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January 31, 2006

Training: Day 5 Of 6

Today concluded Day Five of a six-day internal training session on SharePoint.

One of my key projects right now consists of designing, developing and delivering a new-n'-improved version of the Planning Web site. The Office Product Planning core produces a steady stream of original research, analysis, and insight, and we (obviously) need to get that information to different groups inside Microsoft. Given that Microsoft employs 60,000 people - roughly the same number that live in the city of Bellingham, Washington - the project feels, in many ways, like a return to the commercial Web development work I did before b-school: making a small organization's information relevant to a large outside audience. It's actually a lot of fun.

SharePoint is a complex product (and a complex set of technologies), that fundamentally allows for groups of people - workgroups, teams, departments - to publish stuff created in Microsoft Office to the Web for later viewing and editing. So if you've got a PowerPoint deck, a handful of Word files, and some Excel spreadsheets that you need to post in a public place, well, SharePoint's a good tool. And naturally, it's the one we use internally.

(As an aside, SharePoint does lots of other stuff, too, which is mostly what these training sessions are about.)

Coming from a non-Microsoft Web development background (I'm all Apache/PHP/Java/Solaris/MySQL/Mac OS X), I've been on a pretty steep learning curve with terminology, architecture, concepts and inter-relationships between frameworks and whatnot. I've ridden this kind of curve before, back when I was evaluating (and deploying) a content-management server last year. But after five days straight of sitting on my butt in a training center, eyes on a computer screen, listening to lecture, drinking coffee and breathing my own CO2 emissions - well, my brain's like tapioca. Runny tapioca.

The good news, though, is that the product will do what I want it to do. SharePoint can handle 90% of my design, right out of the box. Which means I'll be spending a healthy chunk of my next few weeks actually building (and customizing) said design … but that's just fine with me. It's actually very cool to get a fresh take on something you know well - like translating a favorite novel into a foreign language.

It's back in to the breach tomorrow ... but tonight, I'm gonna unwind.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 31, 2006 7:44 PM.
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January 21, 2006

Meet And Greet

The Microsoft Visio Conference was a smash success.

This was the first time in several years that Microsoft had thrown a Visio conference, and there was clearly a lot of pent-up demand on the part of the attendees. We had customers (folks who actually use Visio), partners (folks that build software that depends on Visio), the Microsoft product and marketing teams, and Microsoft salespeople from around the world. The language diversity was pretty amazing - Sweden, the Netherlands, UK, France, Japan, you name it. In fact, one of the presenters did his talk in Japanese, which meant we used a live translator. Everyone had one of those wireless earpieces that you see at the UN. Crazy.

The show centered on the new data features coming out in Visio 12, and what you can build with them (if you want a big discussion of those, check out Eric Rockey's blog). The audience "oooh"-d and "aaah"-d a lot, and a number of the demos got rounds of applause.

(That's a pretty good sign.)

For my part, I spent a lot of time talking with customers and partners to see what they're doing with Visio, and learning about their industries and problems. The sheer volume and variety of stuff I saw reminded me how incredibly valuable it is to get out of the office and into the field - there's a lot of innovation out there, and you oftentimes miss things if you depend on the Web to tell you everything.

So I'm pretty exhausted, but smiling. It's good to be home on a Saturday morning, you know?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 21, 2006 12:51 PM.
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January 19, 2006

Visio Conference

The Microsoft Visio Conference kicked off in downtown Seattle last night, and it runs through Friday. I'm attending (natch), so blog entries will likely continue to be light this week.

(And, if you're planning to be there for some reason, look me up!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 19, 2006 6:42 AM.
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January 11, 2006

The Unofficial Microsoft Marketing Guy Uniform (tm)

I get asked a lot about "dress code" at work, usually along the lines of, "What do people wear at Microsoft?"

My answer, as usual, is "it depends."

Microsoft has a "dress casually and comfortably" policy, which basically means you can wear whatever you want when you come to work. The ostensible reason for this policy is that it allows people to focus more on their projects, and less on trivial things like, you know, the appropriateness of the slogan on their t-shirt.

As you might imagine, some abuse does occur.

No, it's not as bad as the Dilbert cartoon ("Casual Day Has Gone Too Far"), but certainly I've observed what I call "clothing as a statement of self-importance" behavior. This is where you see someone who comes to work in clothing that's plainly inappropriate, but does so as a way of telegraphing how critical/key/important/vital/essential they are. In other words, the fact that they're not tossed out of the building on their ear ("...and don't come back until you've got pants!") proves that their IQ is really, really high ("See this shirt? The fact that I'm wearing it means my manager values my thinking more than he values your social norms. Punk.").

It's really pretty funny.

On the other end of the spectrum, you've got those of us who work in, or around, the black Satanic art of marketing. In the marketing discipline, it's important to look good (you never know when you'll have a customer come through, or a surprise interview loop), but nobody is really crazy about wearing anything too formal (especially - God forbid - a suit).

The culture seems to have evolved a logical compromise in the following:

• Jeans (preferably nicer, designer ones);
• White t-shirt;
• Belt;
• Nicer dress shirt, worn untucked, tails out, over said t-shirt;
• Nicer dress shoes (preferably black).

This outfit gives the marketing dude (or dudette) something casual (jeans!) while also being a step above a "No, I will not fix your computer" or "Snakes on a plane" t-shirt.

What's funny, though, is that virtually everyone seems to have deduced this logical clothing compromise on their own. This results in a kind of dress code - the Unofficial Microsoft Marketing Guy Uniform. Get a group of marketing guys and gals together in one room, and hoo, boy - it's like a Banana Republic ad.

(Underscoring this point, we Planners have a Wall Of Shame, featuring a series of photos where two (or more!) Planners happened to come to work one day dressed exactly the same way. Everyone on the team - including yours truly - is represented. )

Repeat after me: "you are all individuals!"

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 11, 2006 9:13 PM.
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December 29, 2005

Ghost Town

Microsoft is a ghost town right now.

No, really: everyone's either on vacation or working remotely. Frankly, it feels like I'm in greater danger of running in to a tumbleweed blowing through the halls than into another human being. The cafeteria closes at 2 PM. Heck, even the receptionists aren't in this week.

The good news is that the holidays are an excellent time to get caught up on work. Without constant meetings and interruptions, it's far easier to get good thinking done. I've had these glorious, wonderful uninterrupted blocks of time to work on some of my projects these last few days.

I'm working remotely tomorrow (no meetings, right?), which means this is my last in-office day of the year.

(Is 2005 over already?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 29, 2005 1:52 PM.
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December 16, 2005

Elephant Hunting

Last night was the annual Planning holiday party, held at my boss' home in Seattle. It's a tradition that people bring a "white elephant" gift for exchange.

The rules of white elephant gift-giving are simple: everyone takes a number from a bowl; the lowest number starts. Person #1 selects a gift from under the tree, and opens it.

Person #2 has a little more choice. They can also elect to take a gift from under the tree, or they can steal the gift from Person #1. If they choose to steal, Person #1 can then open another gift from under the tree, or, as the game progresses, steal from others.

The only rules on stealing are a) you can't steal "back" the item just stolen from you, and b) any given item can only be stolen three times.

As you might imagine, this gets competitive (and hysterically funny) pretty fast. When you're out shopping at the store for your white elephant, your real goal is to find something so horrible, kitchy, and gawd-awful that it becomes an object of lust for the other players. There is no higher compliment in the game than to have your item be "locked" - that is, stolen three times, and therefore removed from play. Big winners last night included an oil painting of Elvis, "Thing Hands" (from Fantastic Four), and a talking Napoleon Dynamite doll.

For my part, I brought a white elephant that I thought was sure to get locked - "Mr. T In Your Pocket." It's a tacky, oversized electronic keychain that - you guessed it - plays up to six (six!) Mr. T quotes, from "I pity the fool" to "Quit your jibba jabba." I actually giggled when I bought it at Urban Outfitters.

Sadly, Mr. T was no match for Elvis. But what else is new?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 16, 2005 8:37 AM.
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December 14, 2005

Another Visio Blog!

Eric Rockey, the Lead Program Manager on Visio (and a coworker of mine) has recently started blogging. He's focused on providing information about the next release of Visio ("Visio 12") - tips, tricks, and new features. Pretty cool stuff.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 14, 2005 7:28 PM.
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December 9, 2005

Check Out My Swank Building

The Windows Live team re-branded MSN Virtual Earth as "Windows Live Local" yesterday, and rolled out a series of quite-nice improvements to their mapping and satellite-image system.

One really nice thing about the new system is that its satellite images are fresher than Google's; this means you can now see where I work (Building 36 is the big, battleship-looking thing there in the upper-right). By contrast, Google Maps thinks I work in a big, empty lot (look in the lower right corner).

Pretty nifty, huh?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 9, 2005 4:15 PM.
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December 4, 2005

MLR Wrapup

Thursday was the second half of our MLR session at Microsoft. It started with great promise (new lecturer, fresh material), but quickly turned in to one of those all-day, butt-numbing slog-a-thon conferences. We simply had too much to cover in the limited time available, and you could see people tuning out as the day went on. Ah, well.

On the other hand, my team is great. The vibe is good, and I think we're all going to get along fine. We even got our first choice of project(!) - we're doing some work for the Windows Live group. Now, for the really important question: what cool name will we give ourselves?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 4, 2005 11:55 AM.
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November 30, 2005

Two Days Of MLR

I'm in day-long MLR sessions for both today and tomorrow, holed up here in Building 31 with my classmates.

MLR is shifting gears, and kicking off the team projects today. Our teams were assigned to us via e-mail last week, and we were presented with a list of initiatives that our teams will be allowed to bid on. In some ways, this works a lot like the UW BCN stuff, in that you have 'student teams' that are putting points toward 'consulting projects'; the high bidders get the prize.

I've said before that MLR is a lot like "Business School, Year 3", and I gotta tell ya - today is really driving that home. There was a fair amount of reading that we were asked to do before coming to class, so there I was, sitting in my office yesterday, feet up on the desk, going through the 1/2" stack of double-sided materials with an orange highlighter ... and suddenly was hit with this monster b-school flashback.

Be warned: you can run from the Harvard cases, but you can't hide.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 30, 2005 8:25 AM.
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November 22, 2005

Three Months!

Today is my three-month anniversary with Microsoft.

Crazy, huh?

It feels longer than three months, that's for sure. And yet, it also feels like no time at all has passed since I got here.

OK, so it breaks down like this: the job is fun. And, as a fun job, each individual day tends to fly by ("Is it already 4:30? How'd that happen?"). This makes weeks fly by ("Friday already?"), and, by extension, months ("November already?"). So here I am, looking at my shiny, laminated wall calendar with the "2006" on top, shaking my head.

On the other hand, I'm new. Like, eager-puppy-dog, gosh-I-hope-he's-housetrained new. I'm still doing Rookie Stuff(tm), but have also picked up a lot about the job and what's going on with it (e.g., figuring out which end of the stick is pointy). That process is accelerating. So three months feels like a drop in the bucket, career-wise. And it is.

And finally, the job has an odd, timeless quality to it, such that I often feel like I've been here for years. Part of that comes from having a full plate (BCN, Visio, etc.), and part of it comes from how friendly, and non-status-y everyone is around here. When you can strike up conversations with people fairly easily, it shaves down the sense of being "the new guy" and helps you feel like part of the club.

(Fun fact: as of today I've spent more time here as a full-timer than I did as an intern.)

Boo-yah!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 22, 2005 11:36 AM.
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November 14, 2005

Visio Org Chart Hotness

As I've been spending some quality time with Visio, I've become increasingly enamored of what the product is capable of.

One of the common scenarios that Visio is used for is to create or lay out organization charts (e.g., Manager X has 3 subordinates, each of whom has 2 to 5 direct reports). Visio lets you create org charts manually, of course - just drag the shapes onto the canvas, and the system will builds the connecting lines automatically.

But that's not the cool part.

No, the cool part is that Visio offers some killer org-chart import tools, which allow you to point Visio at a data source and say, "go" ... and Visio then Does The Right thing by spidering the data and building your org chart for you. Good data sources include things like an Excel workbook, tab-separated text, a SQL database, or Microsoft Active Directory.

This is an awesome feature, because it shows off how valuable the visual display of information is relative to, say, a list of items. It's far more compelling to see the structure of Planning as lines and boxes than it is to see some flat, inert Excel spreadsheet. (And, plus, it's automated. Which rocks, because it means less work for users.)

If you want to play with this feature yourself, simply create an Organization Chart template in Visio. Go to the "Organization Chart" menu and pick "Import Organization Data..." The Wizard will walk you through the rest.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 14, 2005 11:20 AM.
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November 3, 2005

BCN: The 'Job Fair'

One of the commitments I've taken on here in Planning involves MBA students/consultants from the University of Washington. Last night, I attended a sort of "job fair" at the UW to answer questions and help student teams understand what they're in for if they throw down with us. It's looking to be a lot of fun.

The project is coordinated through the Business Consulting Network, which is a student-run club at the b-school. For local businesses (of which Microsoft would be one), the value of BCN is compelling: a team of 3 or 4 MBA students working on a project of our choice for 10 weeks, for $700. BCN attracts larger companies, of course - Alaska Airlines and Getty Images were there last night - but I tend to think that small firms are often the ones with the most to gain, if only because they're getting some inexpensive, educated labor.

For students, this is a great chance to get some real-world experience doing a hands-on project that applies what you've been learning in class. It's also a great way to build your resume, and to help create some talking points when you start the internship interviewing cycle.

(I participated in BCN as a first-year MBA student - and no, my project wasn't for Microsoft - so standing on the other side of that table last night was a bit trippy ... kind of a classic "alumni moment" when you realize the baton's been passed to the next generation.)

This project is pretty dang cool and interesting. We're going to have the students do a field study for Planning, observing grad and undergrad students in order to understand how they work and accomplish certain kinds of tasks. Our MBAs will be responsible for recruiting participants, establishing relationships and working with them, conducting interviews (and even doing a bit of ethnography), and then summarizing their findings into a report/presentation to be delivered in early March.

Something I'm especially proud of is how smoothly this thing looks to go. Microsoft is very big on "setting people up for success" before engaging them on projects (my 2004 summer internship was very much designed this way). This means that project owners (in this case, me) are expected to do the right kind of advance thinking and documentation to make sure that the students know what success looks like, and how we want them to get there. It may seem like common sense, but it's a helpful planning tool nonetheless: for example, we've scoped this research to be appropriate to the student skill level (these are first-year students, so they've not yet taken the full range of MBA coursework), available time (they have midterms, holidays, finals, and a study tour to contend with), and the expectations of my team.

Now that the "job fair" is over, the student teams will bid on the projects they're interested in; BCN's leadership handles the assignments. The big kickoff dinner is the 17th.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 3, 2005 2:11 PM.
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October 28, 2005

Xbox 360

This afternoon, I had the good luck to sit in on a presentation to Office folks on the Xbox 360, including some hands-on sharing of hardware, accessories, and so forth. It was the first time I'd ever seen the device in person; everything up 'til now has been product photography or the demo given at the Microsoft Company Meeting.

The product really, really kicks ass.

The presenters made the presentation sing: J. Allard (VP, Xbox) (quip: "We wouldn't normally have done a PowerPoint deck, but we realized we were presenting to the Office team"), and his buddy Doug (the guy who did the Company Meeting demo). They clearly care about the product, have been intimately involved with it since its inception, and are just a few weeks away from seeing their baby launch. So to say they're proud, hyped, and enthusiastic ... well, they are. So there.

Most of the stuff discussed was confidential, so I can't dish about specifics. Randomly, just as J. was telling us that we Ought Not To Leak, we all noticed there was a guy in a head-to-toe gorilla suit in the fifth row (it's Halloween, remember?) - so it could have been anybody. The big joke was that it was a spy from "our honorable competitors." (Oddly, nobody demanded a badge. Hm.)

The presentation ranged from key product-development lessons, to understanding how the Xbox teams were/are organized, how they motivated their team and kept people going the same direction. J. was open and funny; the talk was deeply, deeply interesting (and translatable to other products and industries). Frankly, I kept wondering when the book on this is going to come out, ala "The Search" and Google.

Oh, and there were demos. Demos, demos, demos.

Did I mention the product kicks ass?

UPDATE, May 6, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 28, 2005 5:20 PM.
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Munchkin Invasion!

Building 36 has been taken over by kids! Run!

No, seriously - today is the "Microsoft Halloween" event where kid-havin' coworkers bring their children so they can trick-or-treat from office to office. I've got a big blue bowl of Skittles, Mike n' Ike, Hot Tamales and Starbust outside my door. There's a lot of kids here, so the candy's going fast. The costumes are pretty great, too.

(I think I've got a sugar high just from the vapors.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 28, 2005 3:28 PM.
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October 27, 2005

20/20 Visio(n)

So it's official: I'm the planner for Microsoft Office Visio.

It's been a little ... strange to be a planner without a product (or, if you like, "minister without portfolio") for the past two months. I've been busy, obviously, with projects and trainings and team business and whatnot, but I've felt a little adrift without a product to call home, sink my teeth into. So I'm thrilled that's changed.

Visio, if you're not familiar, is a visual diagramming tool: you use it to lay out and connect objects to one another. Visio's great for process diagrams ("Do A, then do B, then do C"), timelines, calendars, and organization charts. It's also great for architectural stuff (I've done a layout of my office, for example, in Visio, and you could easily use it to design a floor plan of your home), and is often used by IT professionals who want to diagram their (increasingly complex) computer networks or databases. Visio also supports some cool importing/discovery features, which means that Visio can take an Excel Workbook, say, build diagrams for you.

It's a hot product.

Microsoft acquired Visio back in 2000 (from a Seattle-based company called - naturally enough - "Visio"). Today, Visio comes in two flavors - Standard and Professional. Like other products - such as FrontPage - it's not included as part of the "core" Office offering (e.g., Word/Excel/PowerPoint).

My job is to help the Visio team evolve the product over the next release. (It's pretty exciting!)

What's next? Well, certainly you can expect some more Visio stuff on my blog over the next weeks/months/years (there are already a few Visio bloggers out there, like Mai-Lan and Chris Castillo, so I'm joining a party in progress.) And I'm also looking forward to meeting customers at the Microsoft Office Visio Conference in January.

I'm happy as all get out. (Can you tell?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 27, 2005 12:14 PM.
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October 25, 2005

Flexible Schedules Rock

One of the things I'm coming to really appreciate about my job is the flexibility/self-management of my schedule. When Microsoft says "we don't really care when you work - just attend your meetings and get your job done" ... well, they actually mean it. This might seem like a small thing, but it's got some pretty outsized psychological benefits. Specifically:

1. You feel like you're in control of your work. This matters. Feeling in control means you're not dragging your butt in on a Friday because the boss is all over you; rather, you're coming in to the office because you want to.
2. Trivial stress goes poof. Life is stochastic, and a lot of emotional and intellectual energy can get burned up just trying to manage the randomness. With a flexible schedule, a lot of those energy expenditures simply cease to be a factor. Is traffic kinda crappy? Did you miss your bus by 2 minutes? No worries. Show up when you can.
3. Time is de-emphasized. When your schedule is, well, your schedule, the volume of time one spends at work ceases to be a relevant factor. There's just no point in talking about 5 PM as quittin' time - maybe you're done at 4:30 so you can beat traffic and catch the Storm game, maybe you're staying until 7 because you're on deadline. Figure out what's best.
4. Work happens organically. I often get good (or at least, intriguing) ideas in the strangest places - on walks, while cooking, and so on. When taken by the muse, run with it ... even if it's 7 AM on a Sunday (NOTE: this actually has happened with me). Conversely, if your brain is tapioca and you're drooling on yourself, then by all means get up and go do something else until you're able to engage on the problem again.

This last point is key. Generally, my brain works better in the mornings and in the later afternoons, and I'm often worthless from 1 to 3 PM. So yesterday, rather than faking it at my desk between 1 and 3, I decided to try something different, slung a gym bag over my shoulder and walked over to the Pro Club for a swim. After putting in 1,650 yards (and hoo, boy - it's been a while since I've done that! Ouch!), I was showered and walking back to campus 45 minutes later.

All told, I was gone for about two hours. But here's the funny thing - when I got back, I was pumped. High energy, great brain function. And I ran with the high, finally taking off 'round 7 PM. It was excellent.

I really, really like being treated like an adult.

(And, total sidebar: nothing quite reminds a guy of every extra slice of pizza he's ever eaten than a Speedo. NOTHING. Time to eat more vegetables and cut down on the deep-fried Twinkies, I think.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 25, 2005 11:17 AM.
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October 20, 2005

Just Give

Every year, Microsoft does a big, company-wide charity push, called the "give" campaign. We're in the middle of the season right now; it runs until the end of October. The basic idea is to get employees involved with their communities or charity of choice through one-time payments and/or ongoing commitments (such as payroll deductions) in 2006. Microsoft being Microsoft, there are metrics around this endeavor: the company's stated goal is to raise $60 million and get 70% of the company participating.

Yesterday, I threw down with the program, but I'll talk about that in a second.

One of the company benefits I've been most surprised by is the one surrounding charitable giving. Microsoft policy is to match employee contributions, dollar-for-dollar, up to $12,000 per calendar year. If you care about a cause (my friend Marnie, for instance, volunteers at PAWS), then the company will double your money should you choose to donate. And, if you prefer to give time instead of cash, Microsoft will comp that, too - they match each hour you spend volunteering with an in-kind donation of dollars. (The per-hour dollar amount isn't as high as, say, your annual salary, but that's not the point - the point is that the matching exists at all.) And, for my part, it means any cash donations I give at February's UW Challenge For Charity auction will go twice as far.

As part of the campaign, the stairwells, hallways, lunchrooms and whatnot have been plastered with "Just Give" posters, each pointing out that, say, $1/day will feed dinner to a family of four, or $3/day will help shelter a woman and her two children from domestic abuse. And, taken together, this leads to an interesting, philosophical question: where do you devote your (limited) resources? Where will your help do the most good?

This is a question I've been wrestling with at lot over the past few months. Before she retired, my mom was a professional fundraiser (during her career, she put the new copper roof on St. Mark's Cathedral, among other things), and one of the things she's drilled over and over is the importance of giving back. This is a theme I touched on during my Scholarship Breakfast speech last year, but it's taken on greater tangibility now that I'm back in the workforce, and have access to a ready income.

My friend Susanna and I were out having drinks at 22 Doors on Tuesday, and got in to a long conversation about "how you help" - what cause, what charity, and so on. Susanna's really passionate about education, so she got her Master's in teaching, and now does admissions for a small private school.

How do you stack-rank? Let's say you're in to adult literacy (a very worthy cause). How do you rate that against, say, the needs of some poor woman in need of safe housing? You know? Priorities. Where do you put your foot down? Where do you do the most good?

Microsoft makes services like GuideStar available to employees so we can find charities and organizations that align with our values. That's cool. But what GuideStar can't tell us is how to find out where our dollars and time will do the most. Doctors without Borders? Amnesty International? The ACLU?

(For my part, I chose Northwest Harvest, because, well, people are hungry. And that's a pretty primal, human, and solvable problem.)

I know this is a tough, unstructured question, so I throw it to you, dear readers - where do you give? And ... why? Why that over something else?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 20, 2005 6:58 PM.
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October 13, 2005

The Subtleties Of Innovation

So ... I've been noodling on this post for a while now.

It was prompted by some conversations I've had with non-Microsoft folks over beers these last few weeks, and then given a steroid shot at Web 2.0, where I got asked by a zillion different people about Microsoft. But it was the combination of the four-some hours I spent doing Portland, plus the three-plus hours in the car home, that really sussed it out for me. Quality time inside your own head tends to crystallize your thinking.

Specifically, I'm thinking about innovation - and how Microsoft talks to the market about what we're up to.

Let me explain. At the Microsoft Company Meeting, Steve Ballmer talked a lot about the key to Microsoft's future. "The twin pillars of our success," he said, "are innovation and growth."

Ballmer believes (and I agree) that, in a marketplace where customers are increasingly satisfied with "good enough", the successful firm is the one that shakes up customer expectations by bringing innovative ideas to market. The success/adoption of those innovations in the marketplace is the cause of growth, and, presumably, profit. (Repeat as necessary.)

This brings us to Windows Vista.

If you read the press coverage of Vista (and the various blog comments), the four key innovations that we like talk about in the product are:

1. Hardware-accelerated video. By offloading the processing work of the video system from the main CPU (and giving it to a muscular video card from NVIDIA or ATI), Vista gains the ability to do some pretty spectacular, eye-popping graphics. Vista will support transparency, for example, and applications will be able to do some intensely cool things on the screen ... all without bringing your processor to its knees.
2. System-wide search. Vista has taken fast search and integrated it directly into the operating system. Users will be able to find any file (or the contents of any file) anywhere on their hard drive in a matter of seconds. This is a clear improvement over the "happy orange puppy dog" model of Windows XP, where you ask the computer to find something for you, and then can go get a cup of coffee while it does its business.
3. Lightweight Internet applications. Vista will support a new class of lightweight, Internet-centric applications called "Gadgets" that float on the desktop/sidebar. These little programs will do diverse things, from checking the weather, to "counting down" to a specific event at some point in the future, or fetching movie showtimes for your local theater. They're easy to write, and should usher in a vibrant third-party community that creates specific gadgets tailored for just about any interest.
4. Tabbed browsing. The new Internet Explorer, version 7, will come with the ability to open several Web pages in a single window. This makes it easy for users to read a news site like the Seattle Times and, instead of opening a dozen or so new windows, simply keep all the Times-related stories in a single window. Clicking between the "tabs" along the top of the window will let users toggle or close a given Web page.

So here's the problem.

Each and every one of these innovations is shipping in competitive product today. Each and every one.

This doesn't exactly make us look innovative.

Let's talk about Apple's much-ballyhooed Mac OS X for a second. A hardware-accelerated graphics system, "Quartz Extreme", was introduced with Mac OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar") in 2002. System-wide search, called "Spotlight" was introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") in April of this year. And Apple's implementation of a "lightweight Internet application" (Apple calls 'em "widgets", not "gadgets") is called "Dashboard", and it, too came out in April. This stuff is shipping now.

As far as tabbed browsing ... well, just about every Web browser in the world except Internet Explorer has supported tabs for at least the last two years. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, OmniWeb, etc. They've all got tabs.

The web, unsurprisingly, has figured this out. A representative sample from WindowsITPro.com ('Allchin on Vista: "It's Not Going to Work"'):

Windows Vista, as a result, is fighting the OS battles of the last decade, reacting rather than being proactive and innovative. Mac OS X users, for example, can point to many of Vista's features and correctly note that they appeared first on Apple's system, sometimes years ago. For Microsoft, a company that desperately wants to be seen as an innovator, this situation is untenable.

And journalists, too, know the score. In a recent interview with eWeek ("Ballmer: Microsoft Is Intent to Deliver Value"), Steve Ballmer was asked about the "innovation" behind these new features:

Q: Some Microsoft critics say that many of the features in "Longhorn" already exist in other operating systems. How do you respond to that?
A: I don't hear that from enterprise customers. They don't look at the Mac. They just don't. Some people will say some of the features are kissing cousins to features they've seen elsewhere, and that is true. I'm not apologetic about the fact that we should, in a way that doesn't offend anyone else's intellectual property, study and learn and benefit from the work others have done.

In other words ... because we assume our customers "don't know about" other companies that are innovating along the same lines we're talking about ... we get to claim the credit for the innovation?

Excuse me?

Look, Picasso said, "good artists copy; great artists steal." The idea behind that statement is that to copy something is to merely clone the original, leaving it intact. Stealing, conversely, means taking the original and improving on it so radically that the original now looks like a shoddy ripoff. When you 'steal' in this world, you make something your own.

Vista shouldn't copy; Vista needs to steal.

Innovation is not the same thing as discovery. Despite what the die-hards will tell you, Apple didn't invent the GUI - Xerox did. But what Apple did do was improve, refine, and release the Xerox ideas - stealing, not copying - and now very few people even associate Xerox with the first GUI. The Mac gets the credit. Such is stealing.

I know that the Windows team has smart, hard-working people stacked up like cordwood over there. They're coding like mad, and trying to innovate like crazy. So to say, "Yeah, we've now got those features, too" to our customers is clearly not the whole story. Rather, we need to focus on what makes our stuff different and better. We need to tell a better story. When the press (or anyone) says:

Q: "Hey, Mr. Ballmer, isn't it true that Firefox has had tabbed browsing for a while? Doesn't the new IE look, well, derivative?"

Our response needs to be more like this:

A: "You know what? Those guys working on Firefox have done a heck of a job with their tab implementation, and we've admired it for some time. However, we asked ourselves, 'How can we improve?' and what we've come back with takes their work and goes a few steps farther. Our tab implementation does _______ and _______, and we've heard from our customers that a lot of them love our new ________ feature as well. So we respect our colleagues at Mozilla, and we think Firefox is good, but we think our stuff is a lot, lot better."

It's important to Microsoft that we not just lead, but we be seen as leaders. Leaders are statesmen (and women), and give credit where credit is due. "I disagree with the position of my learned opponent" is an excellent, respectful way to enter into a debate - and then you can demolish their argument one point at at time. But standing on stage, pretending our opponent doesn't exist? Well, it makes us look clueless, or worse - simply malicious.

The problem is storytelling. We simply must be better at telling our innovation story. We're going to invent like crazy, of course, but innovation is the thing that will differentiate Microsoft products over the next 5, 10, 20 years. And innovation means standing on the shoulders of - and being respectful to - those who have come before.

Interestingly, we have two great examples of "how to look like an asshat platform vendor" from our good friends at Apple.

#1: In 2001, an innovative developer named Dan Wood introduced a killer piece of software for the Mac called Watson. Watson allowed users to quickly and easily locate information on the Internet, such as movie showtimes and local weather. It was a popular product, and quickly became a 'signature' application for the then-nascent Mac OS X.

Apple promptly cloned Watson, transforming its own, anemic Sherlock application (Sherlock ... Watson ... get it?) into a rip-off of Wood's work in Mac OS X 10.2. Wood, naturally, freaked out. Here was multibillion-dollar Apple, pissing all over a guy who had done a lot to help out the organization. Apple was cemetary-quiet when it came to talking on their decision, and, in the absence of a specific story about why their new Sherlock was different/superior to Watson, the community suspected the worst: ripoff. Apple's reputation took a real hit among developers. For a company trying to position itself as developer-friendly, this was A Bad Move.

#2: In 2003, two smart guys, Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke, released an innovative product called Konfabulator, which allowed people to run lightweight, Internet-aware applications that were constructed from nothing but JavaScript and HTML. Konfabulator was Mac OS X-only, and quickly became a darling of developers who wanted to Do Cool Stuff, but didn't have a lot of time to do it.

Apple, apparently suffering from memory loss, elected to incorporate most (if not all) of Konfabulator's concepts into Mac OS X as Dashboard. Arlo and Perry freaked out (see a pattern?). With memories of the Sherlock/Watson debacle still fresh, the Konfabulator guys thought they were next to get "Watsoned." And again, Apple took a hit - but not as severely, because Dashboard was clearly more innovative than Konfabulator in many ways. (Side note: Konfabulator, burned by being Mac-only, released a Windows version and then got themselves acquired by Yahoo!).

So, back to Vista. We can avoid the sins of our competitors (and subsequent road rash on our reputation) by getting better at telling a story about what makes our stuff different and better. I admire what Scoble and the Channel 9 folks are doing to help explain and evangelize Vista. They're doing a terrific job crawling 'round the product, exposing to to the light. But that can't be our entire marketing effort. Instead, we need those who talk to the press - our CEO and eWeek, for example - to really get out there and talk about what makes our stuff different and better: viscerally, simply, candidly, and respectfully toward our competitors.

We may not invent everything, but we can certainly innovate. The problem, of course, is storytelling. And we need to get a whole, whole lot better at it.

Personally, I think we're up to it.
It's what leaders do.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 13, 2005 10:48 PM.
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October 12, 2005

Master Of My Domain

Whoo-hoo! I'm gettin' my own office!

Ever since I returned to Microsoft, I've been bunking down with Bo (another one of the Planners here in Office). It's been a pretty good deal: Bo and I were interns together last summer, and we work well together. Plus, you know ... he's gone a lot.

Well, Ravi just left our team to move into a Product Management job, and it looks like I've inherited his old space. What kills me is how I found out: I was cc'd on an automatic notice from Helpdesk, informing me that my phone was to be moved. No, really. They just told me they were moving it. So when I came to work this morning, I found my phone was located in Ravi's old digs.

Uh ...

Well, a quick e-mail roundtrip with our ever-capable admin, and, yup, sho' 'nuff, I've got my own office.

G'bye 3353, hello 3359. Time to get decorating!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 12, 2005 12:45 PM.
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October 8, 2005

A Thousand (+64) Words on Web 2.0

The guy in picture above is Sergey Brin. He wasn't on the schedule; rather, he "dropped by to have a conversation" with us.

Such a good conference.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 8, 2005 8:20 AM.
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October 7, 2005

Mine Was A Very Nice Hotel

(With apologies, for the title, to "Yours Is A Very Bad Hotel" which ranks as one of the best, and funniest, uses of PowerPoint in the known universe).

Web 2.0 ends today. And thus, with a heavy heart (and a heavy room-service bill) I've packed up my room, stuffed my belongings back into my Black Suitcase of Death, and checked out.

I'm sorry to see the hotel go. I've been staying at the Pan Pacific, which is just blocks from the Argent (where Web 2 is being held).

To say the hotel is nice is to say that Cameron Diaz "has a good personality." My room looked like something off the set of "Pretty Woman" (and a damn sight better than the Palo Alto Super 8 that sheltered me the last time I was down here). It had pretty much everything you could ask for: spacious main room, tasteful decoration, gi-normous bathroom, nice work area (marble desktop, Aeron chair, in-room high-speed Internet), flat-screen TV, complimentary chocolate, hotel bathrobe. Heck, they have a Bose Wave Radio for the alarm clock. (No, really.)

Maybe this will help illustrate: the Pan Pacific is the kind of hotel where they have bottled water on the end-table, each of which has a very nice note that lets you know you can drink the refreshing beverage, and that, should you choose to do so, a $5 charge will be added to your bill.

I don't stay in hotels like this very often, but I whenever I do I find my tastes becoming more ... refined. Mary used to talk about turning in to a "three star hotel girl", meaning her tastes had upgraded over time from hostels to low-end hotels to hotels with, say, hot water in the tub. I must confess that I'm feeling the siren song of nice hotels, myself.

(Oh, and I was kidding about the room-service bill.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 7, 2005 10:01 AM.
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October 6, 2005

Conferencin'

Web 2.0 is fabulous.

No, really. It is. There are an awful lot of smart people here, each well-versed in the industry and each looking for that next, ineffable thing - the inspiration, the "aha!", the muse, whatever. It adds up to a stunning amount of brainpower, both on-stage and off.

The place is also packed. It's wall-to-wall people around here, which, from a bulk standpoint, is compounded by the fact that everyone's got a laptop (and hence, a laptop bag slung over their shoulder, adding a good 6" of volume to their right or left side). Threading through the common rooms during a break session is a bit treacherous. Part of me thinks I could make a killing selling a small, USB-keychain device with a speaker and a button: press the button, and the speaker just repeats and endless stream of, "Excuse me, coming through, excuse me, excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, sorry about that..."

And not to get off on a rant, here, but I'm sick of sitting. Sick, sick, sick. I'm ready to get up, run around, shout, do anything other than ingest one more snack-time brownie and another cup of weak, hotel-urn coffee. The O'Reilly people have done a fantastic job of giving regular breaks and lunches and whatnot, but, at their core, conferences are really about people sitting on their butts, absorbing information as best they can.

So. I've got some great notes, have met some great people, and am really enthusiastic to see the kind of innovations being demo'd here come to market. In the meantime, though, I've got one more day to go - and I'm finding myself dreaming of the treadmill at the hotel (Karmic retribution, I know...).

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 6, 2005 4:20 PM.
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October 4, 2005

MLR Bootcamp, Day Two

MLR bootcamp wrapped today.

Unlike yesterday, which was case-driven, today centered on lecture, class discussion, and interaction with a panel of seasoned Microsofties. We talked about understanding customers, branding, and the common language the marketing folks use to communicate across the business (this allows, say, a Marketing Gal in Xbox to have an apples-to-apples conversation about customers with a Dynamics Marketing Guy).

The formal, lecture-driven sessions were good (great, actually), but the highlight of the day was the panel.

Four different folks came to talk to us, with Microsoft experience ranging from six to 14 years. And the key lesson each of them tried to impart was simple: failure is OK, as long as you learn from it.

The funniest story of the group came from the PR guy, who talked about a horrific experience at the Windows XP product launch in New York. While I (sadly) can't get in to a lot of details, let's just say that he was more-or-less-guilted by a Microsoft division into setting up a box-signing event for Bill Gates - at an Office Max - that turned into an absolute, unreserved fiasco. Apparently, after surviving the event, he and Bill got in a taxi for a 30-minute drive to the next gig, at which point Bill told him, point-blank, "That was the worst launch event in the history of the company," and then proceeded to compare it, unfavorably, with other launch events from the past ("We had a pretty bad one in the first year of the company, but yours was worse for reasons X, Y, and Z. And then there was a horrible one in '86, but yours was worse for reasons A, B, and C..." and so on).

The PR guy (obviously) still works for Microsoft. And his lesson for us was, "learn to say no" - aka "avoid being guilted into doing something you know you can't do completely and well."

(I can safely say that I've absorbed that.)

Our next MLR session (another two-day block) is at the end of November. I'm quite looking forward to that, as we'll (finally) get our team assignments and find out about our projects.

But for now ... it's all San Francisco, all the time.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 4, 2005 11:26 PM.
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Off To The Bay Area

I'm typing this from Gate D9 at SeaTac, where I'm waiting for a flight down to San Francisco. (And thank God for wireless in the airport; I'm actually able to get work done.)

As I blogged earlier in the week, I'm off to the Web 2.0 Conference. It's a three-day extravaganza of ideas and energy, with some big-time speakers from the industry (such as Terry Semel, Kim Polese, Barry Diller, Joe Kraus, Pierre Omidyar) as well as from Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Yusuf Mehdi). Candidly, I'm expecting it to be awesome.

Being able to go to Web 2.0 has become another one of those "big company/small company" moments for me. Not to reduce things to price, but Web 2.0 is spendy - almost $3,000 for admission alone. When you add hotel, airfare, and incidentals, well, Microsoft is investing a chunk of change, here.

Back in the Media Access/Pacific Rim days, it would have been hard to justify this kind of outlay - not because it would have been a frivolous investment (given the quality of the information, it's clearly not), but instead because we operated in a continuous, cash-is-precious, near-term-revenue-is-critical frame of mind. You spend a lot of time keeping small companies alive, and, despite our successes with each business, none of us partners ever relaxed enough to really feel comfortable spending thousands on long-term items like conferences when there were new machines to be bought, printers to be replaced, and payroll to meet.

(Actually, along the "keep the company alive" vibe, I remember taking a trip to Disney World in 1999 with Khan and Richard; the contingency planning surrounding an 8-day vacation for the three of us - "What happens if the server room catches fire? What do we do if we're invaded by aliens? Do we have network monitoring going to all three of our cell phones?" yadda yadda - took on D-Day-esque proportions.)

I'm very much looking forward to the next few days.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 4, 2005 7:44 PM.
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October 3, 2005

MLR Bootcamp, Day One

Today, Microsoft's Marketing Leadership Program kicked off with a vengeance. My entire day was spent over in Building 122, attending the first of a two-day "Marketing @ Microsoft Bootcamp."

As I've said before, MLR is very much like Business School, Year 3 - a combination of executive lecture, classroom, case-based teamwork, and projects. While that may sound academic and dry, it's really not. Today, for instance, our groups read a short case about the launch of the Tablet PC, then spent a good 40 minutes or so working on strategies we would have recommended. After each group presented their findings to the rest of the class, we were treated to a very entertaining, highly-interactive lecture from the Group Product Manager of Windows Client (aka, "The guy who actually launched the Tablet PC, and was willing to talk with brutal honesty about the good and the bad").

The whole day was like that. Our morning started with 90 minutes of Mich Matthews, the Senior Corporate VP of the Central Marketing Group, proceeded on to the Market Research folks, and did a couple of detours with guest lecturers from Duke and UCLA. Topics ranged from career management to value propositions.

It was pretty useful, sometimes eye-opening stuff. We'll learn more about our ongoing projects tomorrow, during Day Two.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 3, 2005 9:23 PM.
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September 30, 2005

Micronews!

Well, this week's lead story was the Microsoft Company Meeting (natch), and they included a photo gallery of employees and executives that attended.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that a shot of me and some of my fellow Planners had made the slideshow:

Loving That Energy
Gavin Shearer (U.S.), Gaetan Issombo (France), Mike Phillips (UK) and Thanos Moraitinis (Greece) gave the Office group an international flavor. The yellow hue of Office’s windbreakers was determined by a recent group personality profile, they said; yellow energy, said Issombo, “means we love people.”

The "yellow energy" bit takes some explaining (and I don't have time right now), but suffice to say that the four of us were having a great time that morning.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 30, 2005 6:31 PM.
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NEO 2.0: Accelerate

Aside from a Thursday-morning team meeting, I spent most of my yesterday in a daylong New Employee Orientation session called "NEO 2.0: Accelerate"

Microsoft is trying hard to change the way it welcomes and trains new people. Historically, fresh hires would have been given their badge, shown to their office, handed a slip of paper with their e-mail alias and password, told to "get their computer up and running," and wished good luck - often resulting in the new employee staring slack-jawed at a black Dell PC, then picking up the phone to dial helpdesk. Employee satisfaction with this experience was leaving something to be desired.

Clearly, something needed to be done.

The response from folks over in HR has been to create what they call "onboarding" to actively assist new Microsofties over a period of time. Yesterday's orientation was about things such as the "rhythm of the business", career development, "levels" and other key topics.

A few notes:

• Phases of new-employee-ness. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, new Microsoft employees move through distinct phases (four, to be precise) starting with "Anticipating/Planning" (e.g., before you start the job) and ending with "Contributing" (e.g., the ability to pull your own weight). There are two distinct curves that people experience as they move from phase to phase. The first of these, the intellectual curve, tends to look like the classic learning curve, with a steep slope up front, tapering to flat as it moves from left to right.
  
  The other curve is emotional, which tends to look like a roller coaster. You're up (new job! Whoo-hoo!), you're down (Oh, crap! I don't know what to do!), you're up (finished my first first project! Score!), you're down (got my first performance review, and I need to improve! Drat!), and so on. Eventually, the emotional index moves up and to the right, too, but the variance is up-and-down-ness is what this NEO process is supposed to help correct.
  
  I confess that I've experienced both the intellectual and emotional aspects of the job in just this way. And, as we broke up into small groups, it seemed that my experiences were quite common across my group members. Bully for HR for calling it like it is.
  
  
• Cultural annoyances. Our small newbie group talked about things that frustrated/surprised us since coming to the business. Chief among these was the excessive use of acronym/initialism, but I am also perpetually annoyed by the over-reliance on metaphor.
  
  What do I mean? Well, let's say you just met a Microsoft person, and you ask what they do. They might (and I'm making this up, here), say, "I'm in CMG, and I partner with the platforms group."
  
  Uh …. okay. But what the heck does that mean?
  
  "Partner" has a lot of different definitions. So does "platform." When you take those together and multiply them, and then let them marinate in a 60,000-person company, the possible combinations of definition and context get dizzying. So I am forever asking people to back up, explain again, sharpen, and so forth; I need an explanation like, "I provide marketing support to the folks over in Windows. Basically, I do some customer research, work with ad agencies on creative ideas, and make sure folks have access to high-grade marketing materials. My life is all about e-mail."
  
  (sigh). Good luck with that, right?
  
  
• Customer survey. Microsoft does an annual customer survey to see how it's doing with the public on a variety of metrics. Mechanically, that means over two million surveys are sent out, worldwide, across dozens and dozens of countries. (For obvious reasons, I'm not going to get into the results of the survey, but I thought it’s a) existence and b) scope were pretty fascinating.)
  
  
• Review system. Microsoft uses an annual review process to gauge your performance. You're measured against your commitments, and also measured against how well your peers accomplished their commitments. At the end of the review, you're given a score that expresses how well you've done in the most recent cycle. Scores come in one of six possible values, from the lowest ("Comes to work drunk; often observed parking in the handicapped space, despite lack of permit") to the highest ("Personally saved Bill Gates from a fire while also inventing the next billion-dollar business for the company"). Most folks score somewhere in the middle of this range.
  
  
• Levels. How do you keep compensation, stock awards, bonuses, etc. fair and consistent for 60,000 people? You use a level system.
  
  I confess that I have found this aspect of Microsoft to be the strangest. Coming from small companies, I "get" salary, title, scope of job responsibilities, and so on. "Levels", on the other hand, are kinda strange. You're assigned a level when you come in to the business based on your background and professional experience; people in a given level are expected to perform a certain way against a set of criteria that Microsoft has set as the benchmark for being a good employee. If you do better against those criteria, your level will rise; if you do worse, your level can (conceivably) fall.
  
  While the system might seem strange, it's apparently very common in large organizations. One of my friends used to work at Intel, and they use a system that's virtually identical to this.
  
  (Funny point: one of the guys in orientation has a friend who went to seminary, and they use this, too. Crazy, huh?)
  
  Oh, and - cultural tip. Just as the first rule of Fight Club is "You do not talk about Fight Club", the first rule of levels is, "You do not talk about your level." The existence of the system, the way people are measured, and whatnot are very open and transparent - but your specific level is very hush-hush. It's between you, your manager, and HR.

So. Despite the long day, I'm glad I went. I confess to experiencing a bit of big-company disassociation toward the end of it (this happens to me from time to time when I see the vast scope of this place, laid out in a single snapshot), but overall the time was well-spent.

(I can't even imagine how confusing this place must have been before this new system was implemented.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 30, 2005 1:38 PM.
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September 28, 2005

Failure To Communicate

Yesterday, Gina sent me the following in e-mail:

Okay, so I know you've blogged extensively about what a planner does, but boil it down for me in two sentences or less. Because every time I think I have a handle on it, you do a new entry that indicates that I'm totally off.

So we talked on the phone last night, and I explained it to her, and she made that "ohhhhhhhhhh" noise that usually indicates comprehension.

So then I come home tonight, and NetNewsWire does its thing, and I see that Jeff has posted something ("So, now do you get it?") that basically says, uh, that this "friends and family being in the dark about what we do" thing is a real problem:

I really don't think any of my friends and family understand what I do for a living. I'm not even sure my wife, Debra, would be able to describe my job successfully. "He's does a lot of email," would certainly be in there somewhere, but I'm not sure how much further it would go.

Remember: this is my manager. And Planners are supposed to be good at communicating? Maybe we need a marketing consultant, or something.

(I keed, I keed...)

UPDATE, November 11, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 28, 2005 6:59 PM.
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MBA Opportunities At Microsoft

Steven Sinofsky (aka "my boss's boss's boss") is a blogger (no, really), and today put up an interesting piece about "MBA Opportunities At Microsoft":

The two core jobs that can be quite interesting for you if you have a technical passion (not necessarily a technical education or background) and an MBA or are interested in focusing on products and technologies are: Product Planner [and] Product Manager...

A product planner is a member of the product team that is out there ahead of the current R&D efforts. Your role is to be defining new product scenarios that we might want to build in the next generation products and understanding the customer and business rationale for going after the market....

A product manager at Microsoft is responsible for defining and executing the business strategy. You can think of this as the "go to market" strategy for our products.

It's a good read, and I recommend it if you're wondering just what the heck MBAs do around here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 28, 2005 1:20 PM.
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September 27, 2005

Xybots

(Okay, this is way dorky, but it's still worth mentioning.)

Building 36 has a handful of full-size, stand-up video arcade machines scattered around. They're mostly located next to the kitchenettes, and, without exception, each of them has been off (don't ask me why) since I was an intern here last summer.

Imagine my surprise, then, to arrive today and find that, of the two machines on our floor - BattleZone and Xybots - the Xybots machine is up, operating, and set to free play!

(I don't know if you've ever played Xybots, but it's one of those classic '80s arcade games that really makes you appreciate Moore's Law, if you know what I mean.)

Naturally, Bo and I took 10 minutes