Tonynet Explorer

My friends Hillel, Jenny, and Walter at Jackson Fish Market built a lovely site called CarbonGrove, a carbon reduction reminder service and launched in Earth Day this year.

You answer a few questions then they give you some tips on how to reduce your carbon emissions. You can then plant one of the beautiful trees Jenny designed and then watch it grow.

One of the cool things they did on the site is build a WebSlice that let's you easily watch your tree grow in IE8. (WebSlices are a new feature in Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 that allow you to subscribe to part of a web page.)

Here's my tree (named "Chortle"):

My tree at Carbon grove

Check it out!

(Disclosure: my team helped sponsor this project.)

It's been a crazy week. On Wednesday, my team released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8.0, the next version of our web browser. There's always a flurry of activity leading up to a big event like this -- lots of details to get right, last minute fire drills when something doesn't work right, and so on. Because we were announcing the beta during the opening keynote at MIX08 (no, I didn't go this time, but you can read my backstage account from MIX06 here) we had to have everything ready to go by noon on Wednesday. This added to the pressure since we couldn't slip. There were a huge set of coordinated events that had to happen together. Fortunately, the team pulled it off and everything (mostly) went off without a hitch.

The countdown banner in the photo above hangs above the door to the elevators (you can see our nice neon IE logo too). It originally said "IE8 Beta 1 in n Days" but we had to change it because we were keeping the launch date under wraps and didn't want any visitors to see it (there's a press briefing room on our floor that's used by other teams as well).

Anyway, after the signoff, we started blogging about the release (finally!) starting with the announcement of the release. There was the predictable avalanche of blog comments, bugs, and newsgroup questions to respond to. I think it's pretty fun to interact with the community, although I admit I could do with fewer rude commenters. You'll see replies from me in spurts on the IE Blog posts; I try to jump in whenever I have a few free minutes.

Those of us who weren't at MIX watched the keynote in a conference room and had some sparkling wine. Later in the afternoon, we had a bigger shindig with bbq, drinks, IE8 t-shirts, and two Rock Band setups. The team has been crazy about Rock Band lately; we seem to have it at all of our events and even have had some late night office Rock Band action. It's actually a good way to get to know each other, and it's pretty fun seeing who the good singers and drummers are (harder to tell about the guitar/bass players.) Here's Jason, our Test Manager playing drums (he's actually a drummer but was new to Rock Band.) I love the IE team; we have a lot of fun together.

Anyway, it's great to finally be public about IE8 and start talking about it. It's definitely aimed at developers, so we're not showing a lot of cool new end user stuff yet. If you'd like to give it a whirl, you can download it here. On to Beta 2 and release! (And no, I'm not going to say when we're releasing, so don't ask...)

Here's what the IE team and I have been up to. Good times! (I love that we get press releases for our features...)

Here's my boss' explanation of the thing.

I just got back from Foo Camp. It's late, so I'll have to write more later, but sufficed to say I had a great time, learned a lot, met some amazing people, and made some good connections for work. I even met someone who went to my high school in Minnesota (albeit many years after I did).

I had a lovely drive back from Sebastopol too, going out to coast and then driving south to San Francisco down highway 1. (Click here for the route, just for reference). I met up with my college friend Connie at Town Hall for a fantastic dinner and then headed home.

I just came back from a very enjoyable dinner at Canlis with the Internet Explorer Program Management leads; these are basically the people who I work with who run the group that design the next versions of IE, organize the effort to ship it, and lead the work to take care of customers after we ship. Unfortunately, Chris Wilson couldn't make it, but he was off on some amazing SCUBA diving trip, so I don't feel too bad...

As with most teams, some of us have worked together for a while; some of the group came to IE more recently. We work together pretty well, but we haven't all gone out together and just had a fun meal; we were overdue.

Canlis is an old Seattle institution; it's the "dress up" restaurant in Seattle (one of the only ones with a dress code in town). We had a fun time telling stories, getting to know each other better, and generally not talking about work for a few hours. It was also fun to see everyone dressed up a bit.

The food was lovely, of course. I started with steak tartare to die for; easily the best I've ever had. We also had a few orders of truffle fries because the only thing better than fried food is fried food with truffle oil.

Then I had the Yukon River salmon. As I had blogged about earlier, I was looking forward to a chance to try it and had it tonight -- lovely. It was grilled simply (the best way for a fantastic piece of fish) with a little couscous on the side. Yum.

We also had some very nice wines -- some of my favorites

• 1990 Pol Roger -- I love Champagne; I think it makes every event a celebration. I don't know tons about vintages and such, but I recalled that 1990 was a fantastic year for Champagne. This was my first (I think) bottle of Pol Roger. Lovely. Dry and delicious.
• 2000 Peter Michael Les Pavot - Peter Michael is one of my favorite wineries, and the Les Pavot is really great. I'm not sure I've had the 2000 before, but once it opened up it was fantastic.
• 2004 Domaine Serene Pinot Noir - This is definitely one of my favorite pinot noirs, if not my very favorite. The consensus around the table seemed to be that this one was the best wine of the night, even though it was the least expense (although still not cheap...)

On top of the great food and wine, we got to see the Duck Dodge, a sailboat race in Lake Union and a Seattle tradition. I'm not sure anyone but I cared, but I liked it so there you go.

I had a great time; it's important to me to work with people I like. Tonight was a good reminder of why I love my job.

At Microsoft, we love to beat ourselves up, in some ways even more than others do (and that's saying something.) We focus so much on the clever things our competitors do (as if we're supposed to be the only ones with good ideas) or the successes they have that we sometimes lose track of the great things we've done.

I saw this article go by a few months ago and thought it was a good reminder of our success in one area at least: our financial success. I've been meaning to post this for a while now, but I think it's still relevant. Of course, we must never become complacent or too proud of what we've done, but it's good to have a little balance.

SeekingAlpha
10 Reinvigorating Facts About Microsoft's Profits
Monday April 30, 5:57 am ET

Joe Panettieri (The VAR Guy) submits: I have written extensively about Microsoft's (NasdaqGS: MSFT) problems. But last week, I got a stunning reminder about the company's power. It takes Microsoft only 10 hours of business to exceed Red Hat's entire quarterly profit. Skeptical? Check out the math, and nine other facts about Microsoft's most recent earnings report.

Microsoft last week announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In other words, Microsoft's daily net income is about $55 million. That's $55 million in pure profit every 24 hours. Do some quick math and you'll learn it takes Microsoft only about...

• 10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat's (NYSE: RHT - News) quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
• four days to exceed Research In Motion's (NasdaqGS: RIMM) quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
• four days to exceed Starbucks' (NasdaqGS: SBUX) quarterly net income of $205 million.
• one week to exceed Nike's (NYSE: NKE - News) quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
• two weeks to exceed McDonalds' (NYSE: MCD - News) quarterly net income of $762 million.
• two weeks to exceed Apple's (NasdaqGS: AAPL) quarterly net income of $770 million.
• 18 days to exceed Google's (NasdaqGS: GOOG) quarterly net income of $1 billion.
• 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola's (NYSE: KO - News) quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
• five weeks to exceed IBM's (NYSE: IBM - News) quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
• 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart's (NYSE: WMT - News) quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.

For a dead company, Microsoft's profits certainly look lively.

From http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingalpha/070430/33932_id.html?.v=1

(Fixed character problems)

As a long time Microsoft employee, I am saddened and sometimes embarassed by the consistently, um, poor quality of our ads. It makes me very happy when I see a great ad coming out of the company. Invariably, it seems that they come out of our international subsidiaries and not Redmond.

Here's a very well done and funny ad from the Dutch sub. Here's the blog of the guy who did the ad.

Here's an old one from the New Zealand sub that was fantastic too. I think it was pulled though by the corporate police. Too bad.

Anyway, enjoy.

Adam Nash wrote a nice follow-up to my post on cross platform development, which was, in turn, a reply to his post on the topic.

While the discussion appears to be a debate, I actually find myself agreeing with what Adam says (or not disagreeing at least.)

• We both agree writing cross platform software is hard and can go horribly awry when done poorly.
• We both agree that well-executed cross-platform software is a sign of an excellent development team.
• We both agree (if you read the comments, etc.) that games and productivity software may be different in the need to be "native" feeling (that games like WoW don't need to feel "OS X-like" or "Vista-like" because they take over the whole screen and don't really interact with other apps or the OS.
• We even agree that working cross platform teaches and grows developers in a way that working on a single platform may not.

Where we may disagree is whether this productivity gain offsets the additional costs of working cross platform. I suppose that depends on the product, how much additional work is required to work cross platform, and how good your team is.

Finally, Adam is correct to introduce what is, perhaps, the ultimate metric by which to determine whether a team should do cross platform work: which approach will allow the product to best succeed? Ultimately, this depends on the metrics of success for that product and the market they're in.

In particular, he raises the question of whether our decision to focus IE on a single platform was smart and whether that decision opened the door for Firefox. It's my belief that web browsing should be an integrated part of the overall computing experience, not simply a sandboxed TV-set on the Internet. The work we did on the RSS platform in IE7 and the availability of IE components as Windows platform elements are a reflection of that view. I don't know how efficiently we could further this model by working cross platform. Success for me and IE is how well we can deliver on this vision, so single-platform development makes sense for us. (We had Mac and Unix versions of IE in an earlier day when browser share was our only success metric. As our view changed, those versions made less sense, so we dropped them.)

I think Firefox was able to establish their share because they brought a solid browser to the market when we took our eye off the ball and had stopped investing in the browser; I don't think the fact they're cross platform helps them that much. The vast majority of their users are on Windows (I don't think they're even the most popular browser on the Mac). I really wonder if they'd be better off just focusing on Windows; looking at their bugs and work items, they certainly have a lot of work to do keeping FF running well on Macs, downlevel Windows, and Linux distros. Could they have delivered more of the stuff they had to cut from Firefox 2 if they only had to do Windows? Probably. Would it have mattered? Who knows.

At the end of the day, the market will decide which approach is best in each case. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Adam Nash, a very smart friend of mine from college who writes the great blog Psychohistory, recently mentioned that he thinks it's a great sign when a developer goes cross-platform almost immediately, citing the Joost beta for Mac OS X.

I started writing a comment in reply, but it started getting long enough to warrant a post and trackback.

As usual, Adam's reasoning is sound, especially considering his background in VC. He's right that a company that can build great cross platform apps simultaneously probably has a great development team. However, I'd argue that cross platform development rarely produces the best products.

First, the product often winds up representing the lowest common denominator of the capabilities of the OS' they serve. They are often not as polished or well-integrated as native apps. Firefox is a good example of this from a UI perspective. While it's certainly a pretty well-written app, it's not as native-looking on the Mac as Safari or on Windows Vista as IE7. In both cases, Firefox is a bit out of place. (Read this post on Coding Horror for a similar opinion.)

Also, in order to ease development, cross platform apps often have intermediate layers to factor out the underlying OS. These layers can impede performance and may prevent the app from taking advantage of native services like DirectX or Quartz. The resulting apps aren't usually as fast as their native counterparts. Microsoft's Mac apps certainly ran into this problem when writing cross platform "core code" apps on our Windows Layers for Macintosh (WLM) back in the mid '90s (anyone remember Mac Word 6?)

Finally, developing cross platform reduces the overall innovation a developer can provide. Building for multiple operating systems (or browsers) is never less work than building for one. The time spent architecting, coding, testing, and debugging for multiple platforms is time not spent adding new features, making the product more reliable or secure, or satisfying other user demands (or saving investors' money).

There are certainly no guarantees of a gorgeous, OS-exploitive, fast application when you target only one OS, but its's way harder when you are trying to serve multiple masters.

There's no doubt that teams that can execute cross platform consistently well over time are probably great, but just think what they could accomplish if they chose to focus all that talent and energy on one platform.

Anyway, go read Adam's blog. Lots of good stuff there, especially his financial posts.

The IE team let loose Friday night at the Fenix to celebrate Lunar New Year. Felicity, our brilliant group assistant (and the woman who really runs the team), figured that having a traditional end-of-year holiday party was a bad idea -- too many conflicts, hard to get a baby sitter, too expensive to get a venue, etc. In light of our bad weather in December, this was particularly lucky.

Anyway, aside from the pool tables and normal club stuff at the Fenix, Felicity had the Rockaraoke band there. As I've blogged about before, Rockaroake is like normal karaoke, except you sing with a live band. It's tons of fun, especially when you know everyone who is singing. There were some surprisingly talented people on the team and some whose willingness to please their significant others outweighed their singing talent. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seemed that the Program Managers (stereotypically the most extroverted/attention seeking of the job functions) did much of the singing, although there were clearly representatives from the other disciplines including Katya and her friend Stephanie in the photo above. (In the interest of full disclosure, I sang Margaritaville solo and Summer Nights with Kellie - and yes, Kellie, I will continue to link to that horrible photo of you until you start blogging or otherwise create a presence on the web.)

The event was also special because team members could bring a guest. It was great to meet the spouses and significant-others and to really thank them for their sacrifices. We focus a lot on how hard a team works to ship something like IE; it's easy to overlook the burden our long nights and weekends places on our families and friends.

Good times.

Hurray! Windows Vista (and Office 2007) are finally available to real people (not that business people aren't real too...) Most people will get Vista with a new PC, but if you're dying to get it now, you can buy and download a copy from Windows Marketplace. This is the first time we've sold Windows or Office online via download. Pretty cool. Check it out!

Get Windows Vista

Get Office 2007

Andrew (9): "Could I have an iPod? Maybe an iPod Nano?"

Us (two Microsoft employees): "Well, maybe for your birthday we can get you a Zune."

Andrew [confused]: "An iPod Zune?"

Um, I think we still have a long way to go on Zune awareness...

Yesterday I got mail from one of the zillion or so vice-presidents at Microsoft with Yet-Another-Idea-for-IE. He had a pretty complex idea to make it possible to use the keyboard to initiate a search and return the results in a new tab.

I replied with the keyboard shortcuts already in IE7 that do this (proving that not even Microsoft VPs - or especially VPs - don't read our docs. This also illustrates why we don't normally let VPs design stuff.). Anyway, here are the shortcuts:

• Ctrl-E to put the cursor into the toolbar search box.
• <type your search term>
• Alt-Enter to start the search and put the results into a new tab.

I use this all the time.

While I'm at it, here are a few other favorites

• Alt-Enter in the address bar opens typed URL in a new tab.
• Shift-Ctrl-Enter gives you a custom way to complete URLs in the address bar by adding "http://" in front and whatever in back much like the Ctrl-Enter behavior I blogged about before. You set this option in Tools:Internet Options. Click the "Languages" button on the bottom of the first tab and make your selections. I use it to append ".org" on URLs, but you might use it to add the suffix for a particular country like ".co.uk" or something.
  
• Middle-click to open a link in a new tab. This is usually the mouse wheel. On some laptops, clicking both buttons generates a middle click. Ctrl-Click also works.
• Shift-Ctrl-click opens a link in a tab and switches to that new tab.
• Space Bar to scroll (I blogged about this a long time ago.)
• If you hum Brick House into a microphone and you type "I love IE more than bacon", you unlock the BFG9000. (OK, not really, but how cool would it be if we put in cheat codes and big guns...)

This isn't rocket science, but it makes my daily browsing a lot more efficient. There are lots more here in the "IE7 Quick Reference Sheet" that Seth McLaughlin, one of our star interns, put together last summer.

The cake we sent to Mozilla keeps coming back, this time in a survey by Mary-Jo Foley (popular and influential tech writer and analyst.) 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=101

After five long years, we had the Windows Vista ship party yesterday. It was in the parking garage under Building 27, which sounds like an odd venue, but there aren't many places at Microsoft that can hold so many people on a rainy afternoon. It was good fun to see everyone there; I'm surprised how many people I know from other teams. I was also surprised to see how emotional I was during Jim Allchin's talk as well as BillG's talk. (Jim in the outgoing President of the Windows division and the guy most associated with Vista). Everyone I talked to was happy, relieved, and strangely, a bit lost. We've all been so focused on Vista for so long, that it's odd to not have it ahead of us anymore.

Anyway, the party was fun. There was a mainstage band, a dueling piano bar, a red carpet/limonsene entrance to make everyone coming in feel special (complete with camera crew and velvet rope line entrace), billiards, fake tattoos, a dress-up photo booth (there's a funny one of me with my friends), and of course, food and drinks. We also all signed a few big Vista DVD replicas for the history books. I'm proud to have been part of it.

Some photos:

After five long years, we finally shipped Windows Vista. Whew.

As you probably know, Vista was previously codenamed "Longhorn". It was named after the Longhorn Saloon up in Whistler, BC. The bar is halfway between the Whistler and Blackcomb ski mountains. The release was supposed to be the fast release between "Whistler" (Windows XP) and "Blackcomb" (the next great thing). Oops. Well, it took a little longer than we thought, but the result is actually pretty darn good.

The ending was a little anti-climatic for me since we had already shipped IE7 on XP. We didn't have a lot of drama at the end like I'm used to. This is actually good and the way you want it, but it still felt like an odd let down for something so big. It's a bit surreal to finally have it out though, like I can't quite believe we actually did it.

We're having a big ship party this afternoon. I think that will help make it feel real to me.

Look for Vista in stores and on PCs starting January 30, 2007. Really.

I'm so proud. The cake story made Boingboing and Slashdot (well, not my post detailing what happened, but the story about the cake.)

It's so funny that smart but apparently under-busy people keep looking for some hidden meaning in the cake. From the Boingboing article:

Update 2: Fred sez, "The IE-team cake looked suspicious, what with the irregular white and black marks. The conspiracy theorist in me made me think about Morse code. I saw in the comments on the original blog that some people had looked at it and that there is no obvious morse code there. I couldn't be bothered to write a perl script to parse it depending on the starting place and direction of the message (cw or ccw), but it sure looks like some kind of message. I see, starting top left going cw, 'S E S / A T / (D:N:B) (U:V:A) / T N' I assume that someone else could properly decode this, so I suggest sending this as a challenge to all the would-be cryptographers and lovers of codes. What message has the IE-team hidden in the icing on the Firefox cake?"

The poor Mozilla guy who blogged about the cake had his server bandwidth charges fly through the roof with all the traffic. Sorry about that.

The Mozilla guys released Firefox 2 today. I know that it's a ton of work to release something as big and complex as a browser, so I thought it would be nice if we sent them a cake congratulating them on this achievement.

Since I didn't know any bakeries near the Mozilla headquarters, Christopher Vaughan and I called on a friend, Liz, down in Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus to see if she could help us out. She immediately obliged and found a bakery that would make the cake and deliver it. Liz mentioned something about the bakery not using food coloring, so our "e" logo wouldn't be blue. Oh well. Best not to poison the FF guys with food coloring anyway. (For those who care, it was a chocolate rum cake from the Prolific Oven in Palo Alto. This is apparently one of their most popular styles. I hope it was good.)

Well, Fred from the Mozilla project blogged about the cake, and the story got picked up on Digg in a hurry.

As usual the comments on Fred's blog and Digg are hilarious.

I wonder if there's a message hidden in binary in the black frosting around the edge...

Whose blind toddler decorated it for them?

It's probably poison. Ever hear of the trojan horse?
Microsoft: eliminating competition the old fashion way.

Please, like the IE team would seriously sign it "Love,"...good prank

You should send them a cake back, include the recipe, and say you'll gladly accept suggestions for improvement.

Just hope it doesnt have a naked bill gates inside

Did anyone actually eat that cake? And how many were down with diarrhoea or intestinal worms after that?

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. We just wanted to give the FF team a pat on the back. There's no personal animosity between the teams (I like the FF team members I've met so far).

Nothing to see here.

[2006-10-24: fixed a link and some typos]

Somewhat ironically, I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to report that Internet Explorer 7 is finally done and available! Whew. (You can get it here.)

It always feels good to release a new product (I've shipped dozens of products at Microsoft starting with Golf 1.0 for Windows), but I'm especially proud of this one. We rebuilt the team from almost nothing, listened and learned, and worked our asses off for the past few years. It was an exciting ride full of ups and downs all the way to the end. It's not perfect of course, but I think it's pretty darn good. I'm lucky to work with an amazingly dedicated and talented group of people who made it happen. I was struck by how many people from around the company contributed to the product as I was writing the "we're done" mail. It was truly a monumental effort. (No, I won't say how many people worked on IE, so don't ask.)

After we went live on the web yesterday at 5:00pm, we had champagne, blew air horns in the building (an old, lost tradition that I think may have annoyed the other team in our building - oh well), and then went out for more drinks and pool later at The Garage. (Before we left the office, Alex, one of our developers, shared a lovely limited edition cask-strength single malt - Caol Ila. Wow.) We also did a little sidewalk chalking around Microsoft campus to mark the occasion.

Today, we had a slightly bigger party with everyone who helped with IE7. We had the requisite toasts by Dean (our General Manager) and Steven (our Senior VP), had some more champage, and then started throwing people into the fountain, starting with Dean (another old tradition). Of course, I wound up in the fountain as well. It's not as deep as one might think, resulting in a banged up elbow that bled nicely for a while (unfortunately, another old tradition). Fortunately, Jim, another one of our developers brought a nice 18-yo Caol Ila (quite by coincidence), which took the edge off the pain...

This was a big milestone for us. We still have lots of localized versions to ship plus that little Windows Vista thing to finish up. Plus, we've already started work on our next two versions. But, today (and yesterday) it was fun to savor the moment.

So, don't delay - go get it now!

As we mentioned in the IE Blog last week, we're getting close to finishing IE7 and shipping it out to the world; in fact, we hope to have it out sometime this month.

This is really a nerve wracking time for me in any ship cycle. We've done everything we think we can and are tying up the loose ends necessary to complete the release. At this point, if we find a bad bug, we have to reset the clock and maybe push out the date. There isn't much we can do to stop the one bad bug; in fact, if it's in there, we want to find it since it's better to find and fix them before we release, regardless of the disappointment to us.

It really reminds me of the feeling I had in the hospital waiting for the kids to be born. We had done our part and were then just waiting for nature to take its course. It's an odd combination of feeling like you've created something and yet being powerless.

I'm done at last.

My agenda originally had me finishing up mid afternoon on Friday at the local Microsoft office, but things ran long and I wound up having dinner with our MVPs (Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals - enthusiast volunteers who help support our users) at Izzi Pizza, a local pizza chain that serves pizza with a spicier Indonesian twist - not bad). As usual, the MVPs are awesome. This group in particular all knew each other well and really seemed to enjoy each others' company, so it was fun.

Risman from the local office asked me to come in today (Saturday) to open a developer event he was having, so I dutifully showed up to talk to the 100+ mostly ASP.net developers who came. I guess there was some misunderstanding about my role. I thought I was just going to do some quick ceremonial bit, but Risman was hoping for an IE7 talk and demo. I hadn't prepared anything or even brought my computer, so I freestyled a fifteen minute talk with Q&A. I jetted out afterwards with six bottles and jars of local chilli sauce that Risman brought me after seeing how much I liked the sauces the day before. Pretty much everyone I've met in the various Microsoft offices has been great; they do so much for us and have so much energy and initiative. We're lucky to have them be our face to the customer.

So, now I'm back in the hotel room packing. I've got about an hour before I need to leave.

See you on the other side.

We made the RC1 build of IE7 available for download today. Yippee! This is the near final release of IE7 for XP class operating systems. At this point, we'll only fix big big bugs before we release (sometime between October and December, depending on feedback.)

Go get it now!

Oh, please oh please install the security updates from Microsoft and any other vendor whose software you run. I've just been talking with a bunch of users who are experiencing problems with a major website. Looks like if you have the latest updates from Microsoft, there's no problem, but of course, these people weren't updating their computers.

It's so easy. Visit http://updates.microsoft.com and click the Express button. Even better, if you see a choice that says something about using "Microsoft Update" choose that; this will update most of your Microsoft software including Windows and Office. Pick all of the automatic options to make it even easier.

It's a dangerous world out there with lots of bad people who want to break into your computer. We fix tons of security issues as well as reliability problems in these updates. It's definitely worth keeping up-to-date.

I just finished making my travel arrangements to Jakarta (that's in Indonesia for the geographically challenged) where I'll be speaking at the Bellua Cyber Security conference August 30-31. Seems like most of my international travel lately has been to Southeast Asia/Oceania - not that I'm complaining. Maybe it's time for me to find a speaking gig in Spain or Italy next...

In any case, I've never been to Jakarta before -- any tips? If you're headed to Bellua, let me know!

I'm proud to announce that we released the beta 3 release of IE7. We fixed a ton of bugs, incorporated changes based on beta feedback, and continued to improve our security. You can read more about the release on the IE blog and get the new version here.

There's a bunch of news coming out about it already. I did an interview with CNET yesterday that was posted today as well. They didn't quote me out of context too much... :)

Wahoo!

This week we had our traditional bbq at Bill Gates' home for our interns. As the company has grown, this event has become more exclusive. It used to be that all of the interns and mentors went plus senior managers, etc. Now, it's a subset of the interns (not exactly sure of which subset) plus VPs & general managers (not sure how I got invited; I think it's because our awesome recruiters like me...) Anyway, it's probably been 6-7 years since I"ve been to Bill's house for this event.

Boy, the interns look young. I'm almost twice their age, but they're still as smart as ever. If we get these guys to come full time, we'll be in good shape for the future. I really enjoyed talking to them, especially, the young woman who thought I was an intern too...

We didn't really spend time in the house. You come in and go down this long staircase to get from the entrance to the backyard where the event was. As everyone walked down the stairs, you could see them peeking into the rooms, theater, etc. to check out this famous home; it really is lovely. I understand this was the public side of the house, and that there is a more private area as well (which I haven't seen of course).

Bill came out and was chatting with the interns. As usual the "donut" formed around Bill with interns listening, some trying to sound smart, others just taking it all in. Smaller donuts formed around some of the better known execs as well, while other execs milled around talking to each other.

Anyway, it was a beautiful night on the lawn on the shores of Lake Washington.

One of my group mates had to leave early from the business problems class I attended this week. He mentioned there was a big company announcement at 1:30pm that day he had to help set up (he is the head of our corporate events team), but he wouldn't tell us any details when asked. So, of course, two of us started IMing around to our contacts who might know something about it (Bill's speech writer, PR guys, etc.) but everyone was uncharacteristically tight-lipped. (We're not consistently good about keeping secrets, especially a few hours before an announcement.) So, we had a good time trying to guess what the deal was. We all took a break from the class to watch the webcast.

I can't say I'm surprised that Bill is leaving. We've known this day would come for a long time. I agree with Bill's statement that we're better positioned than ever for this from a leadership perspective. In particular Ray Ozzie has been a great addition to the company; I really like his insight and style so far. (Although I wish he kept his blog up to date...)

Honestly, despite all the amazing things I think Bill accomplished in technology, I suspect history will remember him for the work the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will do. He and Melinda have an unprecendented opportunity to really make a huge difference. I can't wait to see what they do. I'm glad Bill will be focusing his energy on the Foundation's great work.

Still, I found myself getting a bit emotional during the press conference. Microsoft really is Bill's company. I'm proud of what we've accomplished under him and am sad to see him go. Personally, obviously Microsoft has been one of the major influences on my life, forming the framework of my last sixteen years and shaping who I am. It's natural, I think for me to associate a lot of the goodness in my life with Bill and the work he's done. Steve Ballmer is great too, but I didn't really meet him until last week at Strategy Conference. I have "Bill stories" going back throughout my career. This change is even more poignant since I just saw Bill last week, so his presence is fairly immediate for me.

I'm glad that the transition will be an orderly, thoughtful exit. We'll be fine without Bill, but we won't be the same. Should be interesting to see...

I just finished another good three day class at work. This class was the final class in a set of three and was meant to be the application of the first two. My fellow students were other mid level managers who were identified by their management as having some potential for more development.

Like virtually every such gathering, we started with a "get to know each other" exercise, but this one was actually useful. We sat in a circle. The first person had to pick an adjective that sort of described them and started with the first letter of their first name, saying both together (i.e. 'Tea-drinking Tom" was the first person). The next person said "Tea-drinking Tom" and then said their own adjective and name, "Snow-shoeing Scott" and so on. (I was "Talisker Tony".) Unlike other intro drills, everyone paid rapt attention so they didn't screw up in front of the others (we're a little competitive too which helped.) As it turns out, it's very important to see the person's face when you hear the name (not sure why). Invariably, people ran into trouble remembering the names of the people near them, especially the one immediately before. Still, it was a great exercise and one that helped keep the names in our brains.

The class itself was a lot like the Strategy Conference I attended last week; we broke out into groups and discussed a business problem (what rules/guidance/limits should Microsoft place on Microsoft employees blogging, if any) and then presented it at the end. The topic was controversial and difficult because it's easy for a blogger to create a PR controversy or leak sensitive information, but they generate a lot of value for our customers and the company by their very free nature. I think we had a reasonable compromise solution and will try to get it implemented (I can't disclose the plan just yet.)

Anyway, like Strat Conference, it was good to work with other senior leaders from around the company. I liked my group and hope to stay in touch. It was a bit unusual to do two of these back-to-back though. I think I would have gotten more out of it if I had more time between them. It was just a fluke that this happened. Oh well.

Kathy Sierra, author of the fantastic "Creating Passionate Users" blog just wrote a post about how out-of-context surprises like the bud vase in the new VW Beetle can delight users. She listed a bunch of neat examples of this, so imagine my surprise when my talk at Webstock was one of the examples! Now, it's too bad that a nice Microsoft guy at a web conference is a surprise, but I appreciate the recognition.

Context: A Microsoft guy giving a conference presentation

Delightful Out-of-Context Surprise: He's a Really Nice Guy! With kids even!

Tony Chor was a highlight for many of us at Webstock, myself included, who weren't expecting someone quite so fun, down-to-earth, approachable, and, well, cute. Then again every employee of Microsoft I've actually talked to seems to be a Really Nice Person.

(For the record, Kathy was great in her talk. She was intelligent, witty, and charming, keeping the audience rapt even though she was the last speaker of the conference.)

Last week I had the privilege of attending one of the regular Microsoft Strategy Conferences. This three day classes/working session is meant for senior functional leaders/directors from across the company to get together, learn more about how to form strategy, discuss some of the big challenges facing Microsoft, and make contacts outside of their normal group.

The thing that makes Strategy Conference unique compared to other MS classes is the access to execs. We had half a dozen or so vice-presidents there, some who I interact with regularly like Christopher Payne (Windows Live Search) and others who I'd never met like Jane Boulware (Central Marketing Group). What's more, we got serious quality time with Steve Balmer and Bill Gates - rare for even our execs. It was great to have unstructured, very open conversations with Bill, Steve, and other execs and gave me new insights to the things that are on their minds (and things that they are less concerned about.)

I feel especially fortunate because my breakout group was super. We had attorneys, researcher from Microsoft Research, marketers, business managers, and other product people working well together and having fun. Blair Westlake was the VP assigned to our group; I'd never met him before. It was fascinating to learn about the economics of the TV industry (Blair runs our media partnership efforts and was the Chairman of Universal's TV and Networks group).

Although there were one or two people I met who make me wonder "Really? You're the best your team has to offer?" I was once again impressed with the talent and passion of my peers and leaders. I learned a ton about what's going on in the company, got new perspectives on problems I've been thinking about, and had a lot of fun.

While the three days were pretty packed, I really enjoyed it. I appreciate the fact the company really invests in our employees through training and access. The conference recharged my faith and commitment to Microsoft and gives me more optimism than ever that we have great people leading the company forward.

I just finished my talk at Webstock here in Wellington. I'm currently going through my typical post-talk adrenaline crash. I enjoyed the talk and am gratified that people laughed at my jokes and that the demo machine behaved well - never a sure thing when running beta software, projecting to a strange monitor, and running on a live internet connection. I understand the talk will be made available online soon. I'll post it when it does, and I'll write more about my Webstock experiences later.

Technorati tags: webstock

Today is my last day in Auckland. Grandhi and I have a few meetings with customers, partners, and the MS New Zealand guys before we head down to Wellington this afternoon. It'll be a bit of a hectic day I think.

Yesterday was pretty calm by comparison. We didn't have much in the way of meetings, so we checked out the New Zealand National Maritime Museum. I love maritime museums (surprise, surprise) and Grandhi was nice enough to indulge me. The museum was quite good and much larger that outward appearances might suggest.

Afterwards, we had a nice lunch at the Loaded Hog by the Viaduct Basin (where the Americas Cup boats sortied out from). I didn't love the beers they brewed onsite, but the food was good. the local mussels are well-known and tasty, although I still think Penn Cove mussels in Seattle are better. Too bad it was raining all day; otherwise sitting out on the sidewalk would have been great.

We worked all afternoon trying to get ready for our upcoming talks and keep up with work at home. We then headed out to Parnell, a cute neighborhood in Auckland full of art galleries and shops, all of which close early to spite us. Fortunately, we found a nice restaurant called Igaucu for dinner. Pretty cool place. I finally got some lamb here in New Zealand. Everything you've heard about lamb in NZ is true -- fantastic. The one thing I've noticed is that every restaurant we've eaten in so far has under salted the food relative to my tastes. Grandhi and I both have been adding copious amounts of salt to everything. Given that Grandhi lives in India, I don't think this is just an American taste thing. Anyway, just an observation.

OK, time to pack up and head out. Talk to you from Wellington...

Hurray! We finally shipped Windows Vista beta 2! We have a lot of work to do before final release, but this is a big step. Too bad I'll miss the beta 2 party in Redmond today.

Yesterday, I kicked off my working time in Auckland with an IE7 demo in the keynote at Microsoft Connect, a Microsoft-sponsored conference for IT Pros and Developers. Despite my normal pre-show jitters, the demo went fine with people even giggling at my jokes and applauding for features (the new printing stuff always brings down the house, even though it's just a bug fix really.) The guys from MS New Zealand did a great job with the conference. They really have to cover a lot of ground since Microsoft has so many products; as a result, in many ways, I think they have a better view of our entire line than we do in Redmond.

I also had an interview with Juha Saarinen, a writer for ComputerWorld and PC World. Fortunately, I had some advanced warning of what he was going to ask (ain't blogs great?) He seemed like a good guy with fair questions. We'll see how the reports turn out.

Grandhi and I hung out with partners and the guys from the Microsoft New Zealand sub later in the day and had a surprisingly good Mexican dinner at Mexican Cafe (clever name...). Gotta watch out for the Agavero (tequilla liqueur) though. It goes down pretty smoothly. (Sean, you're evil.)

I'm off to New Zealand today. I'll b