Just wanted to say hi to fellow Microsofties—I’m working in the research labs in Redmond for the summer. When I go back to school in the fall, Microsoft will be paying my tuition as well as a living stipend. Pretty good deal!
I was wondering whether this was something that GomiBoy’s employer would object to. I seem to remember a Microsoft employee who got into trouble over a blog he was writing.
He would have been fine except he linked to a picture of a bunch of new machines showing up in the shipping department. Whether I agree with that or not, it’s pretty explicitly stated that you can’t stroll around taking photos in certain areas and posting them publicly.
As someone who’s playing his Xbox360 right now, I’d like to say that I love it. I’ve had a friend that’s gone through 5 of them. They all got the 3 rings of death. His way of circumventing the Xbox customer support (which has a huge rapport for sucking) is to buy his console from Game Stop or Electronics Botique and spend the 50 bucks for the 2 year warranty (instead of the standard 1 year one). That ended up being an amazing decision on his part.
Of course, you guys changed the length of the warranty to three years. even though it might have been a preemptive assault on further costs (and the second heatsink you guys are supposedly installing on the consoles). Nevertheless, I love the console and can’t wait for Halo 3, Resident Evil 5, Call of Duty 4, and Grand Theft Auto 4.
Some catching up to do - forgive me if I miss anything. And ‘hi’ to all the other Microsofties, not quite so much of a unique one as i thought 
BTW - Microsoft doesn’t have a problem with blogs or anything else except where they release proprietary information and I will not be doing that - I value my job too much. I will be hiding behind some anonymity on the boards here, but I figure I’ll take my chances. It’s not like I’m gonna give away any trade secrets
No idea, mate, sorry. Never heard that one.
No, I don’t, but I am a bit of an exception. We push our products where appropriate, but I personally don’t push where there isn’t a fit.
Yes and no. We like our standards, and for obvious reasons push our own standards, but quite frequently the ‘interoperability’ that other vendors demand of us is free access to our source code with nothing in return. We don’t play that game much.
I’ve seen him live a couple of times now, and almost met him once but haven’t actually shaken his hand or anything. I’ve met Ballmer a couple times, mostly ‘hey’ as he came / went from a company do here.
I don’t think you sounded sarcastic. I don’t know anyone directly involved with progam management for the Office group, but I do know that it was pretty much 2 reasons to change the UI were usability and compatibility. Changing to a single, similar UI would mean more interop between other apps (like Visio, Excel, and Word) and the usability is pretty thoroughly improved. It takes some time to get used to, but the functionality grouping in the ribbon actually makes a lot more sense than it did before and things are grouped much more relevantly.
Moved from IMHO to MPSIMS.
How is MSR viewed from within Microsoft? MSR seems to regard itself as a completely seperate company but do you guys communicate with them much or have any idea what they’re doing? Do you think MS gets enough return from MSR or could there be better integration between the two? I was at a conference last year with one of the people who was working on surface and all they could say is something big was coming down the pipe. They were clearly pretty excited about it and I’m glad it finally moved into a commercial product.
Stuff like the Tablet PC, Windows Mobile, Zune, and XBox were all products that started life in MSR. I think we absolutely get good return on investment, as that’s where our next big win is gonna come from. They’ve missed some bets, like any other research org, but I honestly think if there wasn’t the return on investment we wouldn’t keep funding them. Say what you want, guys like Steve Ballmer and Kevin Turner aren’t starry-eyed visionaries but hard-nosed businessmen very concerned with the bottom line. If it don’t make any money, it’s run until it does, and MSR has returned a lot of good products back into mainstream Microsoft.
Surface isn’t really a ‘commercial’ product yet, but it has been launched by Bill recently. Think of it more as a strong Alpha product - it might see the light of day in 12-18 months, but it’ll take that long to build a product specific for it, unless there’s a whole lot more than I know about going on under covers there.
I’ll be honest - I have no earthly idea. I think we’ve slowed development on a lot of Virtual PC stuff, but I honestly think that’s just so we could focus on our ‘core’ business - Office, Vista, Exchange, and Longhorn. I think it’ll come back.
Dude. Cut it out. Seriously.
Would Microsoft like to have a new killer application?
I just walked into two Sprint stores, bearing my Palm Treo device (Sprint branded). I asked about hardware cradles + computer software. After several ticks’ worth of blank stares, the salesthing told me about synchonization options.
That’s pathetic.
OK, folks: I’m at my computer, I have a spreadsheet with 213,000 rows, and Column D contains telephone numbers. I don’t want to export these records to some format that is importable by whatever address book synchonizes to my phone; I just wanna select the cell, hit (for example) F9 and the damn phone DIALS the number.
Or I’m in FileMaker and there’s a field for telnumber, I hit the “Dial” button and it executes an FmPro script that tells the telephone’s API to DIAL the info sent to it by the script.
Or I just want to cal Charlie. I hit (for example Shift-F9) and go the computer’s keypad and manually dial the number from the computer keypad and the phone dials that number.
Or forget my computer, I’m on the subway, I load my phone’s browser (they do that now, yes?) and I go to SomeCommercialSite and it has an 800 number on its “Contact us” web page, so I select that and I hit some button on my cellphone’s buttonpad, and it dials the selected number.\
Back to my computer. I’ve got voicemails. I really ought to be able to hit a button and all “new” voicemails get downlaoded to my computer as .mp3 files. I get to specify where. They should get auto-named with every piece of meta-data that the cellphone can “know” about those voicemails, date time phonenumber etc.
For a totally sophisticated extra, do voice recognition on the voicemail and convert it to text to I can search for any conversation from the dawn of time onwards that contained in its contents “string”. That part is perhaps a little bit 2010. Work on it. Make it happen. If you don’t someone else will.
For plain-old It Should Have Happened Five Years Ago tech, I should be able, from my computer, specify daterange and/or whocalled or Who_I_callled and get a quick list of voicemails.
Oh, and all calls should (optionally) be recorded as .mp3s same as the voicemails. Stick in a customizable disclaimer notice that plays automatically at every phone connection to get past whatever legal restrix apply to the recording of phone conversations. I want all phone convos I particpate in to be documented. Pop up a button-dialog to turn recording off for users who want to turn it off for specified convos. Put a preference by which users can change the default to “dont’ record unless I hold down the specified key”
Unless the hardware manufacturers of the cellphones are somehow holding the rest of the industry hostage and REFUSING to release an API that allows you do to this, why the fuck isn’t all of this yesterday’s technology? I can’t BELIEVE I can’t just have this already.
I am rarely NOT where my computer is. When I am, I am rarely intereted in talking on the fucking phone. If I do, I want a record downloaded when I get back to my computer.
This isn’t rocket science. This is “where the fuck have you folks been, this is so yesterday and I can’t believe it still isn’t just happening”.
My computer just should recognize my cellphone and do all that stuff regardless of model.
Microsoft has the oomph to make this happen. DO make a Mac version, willya?
Thanks in advance. Don’t take too long with it, or someone else will do it first.
Hiya. Look, I don’t think anyone thinks Microsoft is all that evil. Exactly. Not at the developer end.
There are certain places it is stupid, some where we’re wondering who the hell it’s pandering to, and some places that we just throw up our hands.
For example, the Zune and it’s neutered WiFi. Or, for that matter, the file copy bug in Vista. Or, well, pretty much anything in Vista based on DRM.
Well, anything involving DRM really, built into our damn computers. Breaks too much stuff.
And the whole Software as a Service thing. Who wants to buy the same copy of Office yearly or monthly? Sure, revenue stream for y’all, but keeping our documents hostage?
I dunno.
Please don’t get in trouble, man.
::Trying to be vague and not get into trouble:: I can do almost everything you’re asking for. But…QuickTime runs the media show in Leopard and most of what you’re asking for are Wired or Sprite layers in QT - not my baby - QT’s baby; we can’t do anything that they won’t accept. We tried that in 98 with frankelib and it was a disaster - QT APIs rejected anything and everything that didn’t play nice so that they didn’t have to QA it hard. Any time a new standard came out, for example M4A, AAC, etc, we had to allow you to Insert | Movie instead of Insert | Sound and then you’d get them in but not with the menu options you wanted. They could’ve fixed these things, but our issues didn’t exactly get high priority. Alpha testing being their MO. Don’t get me wrong, we have a great relationship with them (myself in particular having coauthored the OpenGL API) but there comes a time when the code complete schedule trumps fixing bugs that only repro in Apps that they don’t own.
I did say “almost” - let’s address the rest:
Having nothing better to do right now (wife out of town), I just made this work from my Bluetooth Leopard Macbook and the E20 XL using our current version that hasn’t been released yet. I’ll see if I can make this happen, but it will be next time, not 2008. Even then, I have no pull with the XL folks. Well, some, but not enough to guarantee that they will take it as a new feature.
Waaaaaaay too much proprietary shit to make this happen. We don’t want to eff with the music industry. Trust me, the MPAA will get invlved, and I can already, right now w/o thinking, think of successful ways to abuse it to steal music.
If it happens, we will do it. We’re not shackled to the WinOffice group. (Thank God - no more teal install screen for us. Although we spent the last couple of YEARS working on their Metro file format to make it compatible. Thanks guys).
Thanks Morbo. Y’all keep kicking that code out. You do have a Mac audience (if a somewhat picky one).
Phones annoy me. I can’t be the only one. First one to really fix it gets rich.
I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. We’re putting our focus on shipping products, is all. Nothing surprising there.
What you’re describing would be very cool; we’ve got some products coming up that do some of this - look up Exchange Unified Messaging and Unified Communications through LCS but it’s not as simple as you’d think to do all this via cellular.
GomiBoy, awesome thread. Very insightful.
The surface computer is like something out of Star Trek. Even more advanced it seems. You never saw crewmembers in Ten Forward playing games on the tabletop while waiting for the food and drink that they ordered, also through the tabletop, to arrive. I think Surface is going to kick ass and that there are a lot more potential uses for it than anyone realizes right now. So the question is, is there a lot of excitement at Microsoft about this product? Is it viewed as the wave of the future or as a quirky toy?
Regarding the Office 2007 UI, Paul Thurott says that the reason why it was changed was because the most requested features for the next version were actually already in the software, buried so deep that no one could find them. Cite.
Thanks for that. I was a bit nervous, seems fine so far
Yup, I think people are pretty excited about it. I work in the Enterprise part of the business, really aiming at business users, and a lot of people see Surface as a really great tool for places like social type arenas and stuff like that - I think it’s gonna be really really cool.
I was referring to your speculation re: Virtual PC. It’s easy to lead people to believe you’re speaking as an employee of MS and not as somebody simply speculating.
First of all, GomiBoy, congratulations and thanks for standing up on the firing line. You’re doing a great job so far.
I started with Win 1.0 (well actually with DOS before that showed up) and used every version up to XP.
Up to an including 3.11, every new version incorporated improvements, yet maintained backward compatibility and did not change very much the way it worked.
Then it started getting nasty, with more keystrokes or mouse clicks to do the same thing as it went to each new version.
What is even more aggravating is changing the way things are done and changing the terminology for the same things in the new version. I can’t see any reason whatsoever for this, and it just makes the learning curve for each new version more time-consuming and frustrating.
IMHO that’s why so many corporate and business users wait as long as possible to move up, knowing the time wasted in teaching the rank and file the new systems, when they were perfectly comfortable with the old one.
I recognize new versions do more things for more people, but it actually seems if the developers purposely make each new version more difficult. What are they, all sadists, chuckling and chortling as they obfuscate? 
What is the justification for this?