The Dancing Pig!

Yet another reason why MSN Messenger is so cool…

 

So my realtor tells me this weekend that he’s in the process of getting a divorce from his wife.  Which means that he’s back in the ‘game’.  And as a thirty-something single guy, where is he going to go to meet girls?  He knows "his type"; but it’s hard to meet those people.

 

So he sinks to (what I think of as) the ultimate low, and goes online to those internet dating sites.  I’ve never been a proponent of sites like these, but obviously plenty of people use them.

 

Anyhow, within days he got hundreds of e-mails from people (most just want to get hitched for a Green Card I think).  But he zeroed in on this Thai girl in Thailand.  And now he uses MSN Messenger daily (err.. nightly) to talk to her.

 

Quote: "I used to think instant messaging was just for teenagers."

 

"[I was] saved by the Dancing Pig!"

 

I’m not sure if I should be proud or embarassed.

 

Rallying the Troops

Gosh.  I had this post semi-written last Friday but haven’t had the time to finish it.  So I guess I should just wrap it up and push it out (hmm sounds familiar).

 

Thoughts on the 2005 Company Meeting (30th Anniversary): [Ugh. They spelt anniversary incorrectly in the caption of the BillG photo.  I hate spelling mistakes.]

– My first company meeting in Safeco Field.  Last year’s was held in a dinky auditorium somewhere downtown and I wasn’t able to get one of the couple hundred tickets.  I watched the webcast last year and suffice to say, it sucked.  This year, 18,000 employees.  Fills up half the stadium.  Wow.  And that’s only about 1/4 of the employees in Redmond.  Microsoft is huge.

– Lots of demos.  Great to get a taste of what other teams in the company are pursuing.  Often we lose touch of anybody over in Main Campus.

– No offense to the guys that work in Office (and, to a lesser extent, Windows), but I’m glad I work in MSN.  Being able to see bar graphs in cells of numbers in Excel really doesn’t do it for me.  (As opposed to seeing a relevance search-off between Google and MSN Search; seeing the next-gen Virtual Earth; seeing Messenger scenarios; seeing start.com; etc etc.)  Being able to drag and drop numbers into Excel is even worse.

 

– Vista (to me) looks like a huge rip-off of Tiger (OS X).  Except for that new 3D Alt+Tab perspective thing.  Other than the initial "cool!" you’ll never use it.

 

– What was up with holding up the placards to spell out "Happy 20th Windows"?  They made us practice it?  How geeky can you get?  (Not to mention the completely random, short-lived, fireworks in the "Happy 10th MSN"..)

 

– Brilliant move scheduling the Company Meetings less than a month after people get their performance reviews back.  As unhappy as people may be, seeing this innovation pipeline coming, with all the cool demos, and SteveB jumping on stage and screaming his butt off just gets you pumped!!  Ballmer also addressed the stock price issues, which was refreshing.

Hmm what else?  Serves me right for waiting a week to post..  Anyhow, I really liked it.  I think it was a good way to spend the day.  This upcoming year should really be interesting for Microsoft.

 

Mmm.. yummy kool-aid.

Regrouping the Troops

Microsoft Realigns for Next Wave of Innovation and Growth

MSN has now been re-org’ed into the "Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, which comprises Windows Client, Server and Tools, and MSN®." I now work for Windows. Strange.

From News.com: Bloggers debate what reorg means for Microsoft. If I were Google I would take note. Microsoft may be big and slow (and *ahem* employees may be frustrated), but we’ve always been good at taking on competition. And leveraging Windows, one of the world’s biggest platforms, is a great step in the right direction.

Randomness (from watching execs talk the talk lately) – Common words used by Executives and management in general: (It’s like they have a very limited vocabulary or something. Here are some synonyms to help them out.)

 

Main Entry:   super Part of Speech:   adjective Definition:   excellent Synonyms:   cool, divine, glorious, great, groovy, hot, incomparable, keen, magnificent, marvelous, matchless, neat, outstanding, peerless, sensational, smashing, superb, terrific, topnotch, wonderful Antonyms:   lousy, rotten Main Entry:   innovation Part of Speech:   noun Definition:   change Synonyms:   addition, alteration, contraption, cutting edge, departure, deviation, in thing, introduction, last word, latest thing, latest wrinkle, leading edge, modernism, modernization, modification, mutation, new wrinkle, newfangled idea, newness, notion, novelty, permutation, shift, variation, vicissitude, what’s happening, wrinkle Main Entry:   agile Part of Speech:   adjective Definition:   nimble Synonyms:   active, acute, alert, athletic, brisk, buoyant, bustling, clever, deft, dexterous, easy-moving, energetic, fleet, frisky, limber, lithe, lively, mercurial, prompt, quick, quick-witted, rapid, ready, sharp, spirited, sportive, spright, sprightly, spry, stirring, supple, swift, vigorous, vivacious, winged, zippy Antonyms:   brittle, clumsy, oafish, ponderous, stiff Main Entry:   cooperation Part of Speech:   noun Definition:   mutual effort Synonyms:   aid, alliance, assistance, cahoots, coaction, coadjuvancy, coalition, collaboration, combination, combined effort, communion, company, concert, concurrence, confederacy, confederation, confunction, conspiracy, federation, fusion, give-and-take, harmony, help, helpfulness, logrolling, participation, partisanship, partnership, playing ball, reciprocity, service, society, symbiosis, synergism, synergy, teaming, teamwork, unanimity, union, unity Antonyms:   autonomy, competition, opposition, rivalry, undermining Source:   Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1) Copyright © 2005 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.   Friday is the Company Meeting. Can’t wait to drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid. I am super excited to hear about how synergy has driven the innovation pipeline and proven just how agile we are. [Wow, they should make me an exec.]

MSN Messenger Rants et al.

Everyone has rants. Everyone has issues with MSN Messenger. I love reading rants about MSN Messenger. And writing rants is fun too. But I think I’ll save that for another time. Overdo and Jerome seem to have done a superb job of it: The MSN Messenger team represents a huge lumbering hippopotamus when compared to Spaces or Start.com. Note that you can count the number of people working on Start.com on one hand (well, you used to; now, only if you have an extra finger or two), and Spaces is only a year or two old. Messenger is a dinosaur that needs to shed some skin and become a gecko or something. (ok that was a lame attempt at an analogy.) It’ll be interesting to see how long before Spaces/Start becomes an elephant, because it doesn’t look like Messenger is slimming down anytime soon. (Ok, ok, enough animals.)

Other random news:

• Mattress people on RedWest: Seattle Start-ups want to Hire You. The job market seems to be on the upswing. Good news if you’re looking for a move; bad news if you aren’t.
• Dare‘s got a list of MSN related stuff at the PDC next week. It feels like this year’s PDC has been super-hyped. We’ll see what interesting stuff next week brings.
• When I was an intern the supply rooms here were stocked with goodies (pens, highlighters, notebooks, notepads, scissors, etc etc.) At some point (I think last year), they decided to cut back and only store that kind of stuff on the first floor of every building. I’ve had to print some docs over the past couple days, and I found that I couldn’t even find a single stapler anywhere. Anywhere. They have a ton of those black clips, but no staplers. How do you function without a stapler? ARGH!

Start.com (Preview) Released!

Start.com has been released! More info on the start.com blog.

Favourite (new) things:

• Yes! They brought back the +/- (more/less) headlines!
• Start menu overlays and doesn’t shift everything over (unless you pin it)!

Not-so-crazy-about things:

• Links turn grey after you’ve clicked on them. Numbers beside each header decrement. I suppose this is useful at a glance.. I’m undecided about this one. It seems to clutter the page a bit.
• Large title font for each feed/startlet.  Looks weird.  I think it was ok before (or maybe just slightly larger).
• Three columns can turn into two columns if your screen isn’t wide enough (just try to decrease the width of the window). That’s really annoying because I have a small screen at home and there’s this massive white space on the right side of the screen.
• Start menu ‘disappears’ as soon as your mouse runs over the border.  It would be nice if there was a 5-10 pixel buffer around the Start menu so it doesn’t disappear (as quickly).
• It would be really cool if the page could reload/refresh every so often (things like stock quotes, etc. change every so often).

Maybe more nitpicking for later on this weekend 🙂  Very nice though.

On a related note, what’s this: start.com/developer? ^o)