Igor Delovski Board

[Igor]

"Matasano Security is running an excellent interview with Christopher
Vaughan, a lead PM on the IE team. Christopher has worked on every
release of Internet Explorer since version 2. He discusses IE7, security
lessons learned from IE6, the future of .NET managed code in IE, and
more."

Slashdot: Interview with IE Lead Program Manager

[delovski]

"My name is Jensen Harris and I'm a Lead Program Manager on the
Microsoft Office "user experience" team.

Our team is responsible for the overall interaction and visual design of the
programs that ship in Office. Most recently, we've been working on a
complete user interface redesign of Office which will ship as part of Office
2007."

At MSDN: Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

[Jean Jacques]

"In late 1991 he took a position in Microsoft’s technical evangelism group,
Developer Relations, where he remained for the bulk of his career.

In Developer Relations, Kraig used his skills to speed the adoption of
Microsoft’s newest technologies by other software companies. He offered
papers and sample programs that demonstrated exactly how to incorporate
those technologies into a wide variety of applications and regularly spoke at
industry conferences. In addition, he continued to publish articles in
magazines such as Microsoft Systems Journal and Windows Programming
Journal.

In 1993 Kraig took his work to another level with the publication of Inside
OLE 2 (Microsoft Press). This book became extremely popular and
catapulted him to the status of an industry expert."

Kraig Brockschmidt recently wrote the book about his time at Microsoft
and the book is available online: Mystic Microsoft

[Bjanko Novac]

Slashdot: Tales From Behind Microsoft's Firewall

"CIOinsight.com is hosting an interview with Robert Scoble on life after
Microsoft. 'By blogging for the world's largest software company, Scoble
changed the way companies communicate with the world and became an
industry celebrity in the process.' He talks about MS culture, senior
management and the benefits of blogging from inside the belly of the
software beast."

[XNote]

Digg - Windows Development Chief: 'I'd buy a Mac if I didn't work for Microsoft"

"Longtime Windows development chief James Allchin wrote in a January
2004 e-mail to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company co-founder Bill
Gates that the software vendor had "lost sight" of customers' needs and
said he would buy a Mac if he wasn't working for Microsoft."

[XNote]

Windows Chief Bows Out

Sitting behind a one-way mirror, a white-haired man struggles to
access a shared music library within Windows Vista.

"I'm lost," he says. "I'm in trouble here."

[delovski]

net.jobs - Microsoft needs Wizards (1984)

"Since we're "owned and operated" by these same
bold people, having no venture capital owners or cash crunches to
limit us, the company's limits are set only by the ability of our
engineers to envision great things and then to (the tough part) make
them fly."

What's happening to OS/2

"So the technical guys to whom we made our presentation thought that
a crude character oriented interface (and the other major problems
that I've since forgotten) was good enough. It said "IBM" so people would
have to buy it. And their very senior managers couldn't understand our
argument, and their own folks said that we were wrong, so that was that."

Both articles posted by Gordon Letwin.

[Ike]

Slashdot: 158 Pages of Microsoft's Dirty Laundry

"Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to
run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as
running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal
scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's
launch."

[Ike]

Slashdot - Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors

"The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista
capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a
wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code
changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss
launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated
March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and avail-
ability on new PCs.'

We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses
but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development,
second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video
and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led
to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver,
but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky,
other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether."

[Ike]

NYT: They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know

"It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice
president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is
dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley,
a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer.
And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional,
is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior
vice president responsible for Windows."

[delovski]

Slashdot: The In-Progress Plot To Kill Google

"Four years after Steve Ballmer vowed to kill Google, Wired details Micro-
soft's, AT&T's, and big publishers' ongoing slog. The story is filled with astro-
turfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about pri-
vacy and monopoly in order to protect the obsolete business models of their
patrons, who are mostly known for progress-halting monopoly and invasion
of privacy. Their greatest coup to date was preventing Google from rescuing
Yahoo."

[delovski]

technologizer.com - The Secret Origin of Windows

"Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at
the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ulti-
mately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a pa-
th toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and fa-
iled to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being
assigned an impossible task."

[delovski]

zdnet.com - Where in the world is J Allard?

"Word inside was Allard was none too happy about the killing off of Courier
and has finally made good on his (what sounds like they may have been
regular) threats about leaving the company all together. (Another person
with whom I communicated claimed CEO Steve Ballmer showed Allard the
door because of disagreements regarding the Courier’s potential.)"

[delovski]

mondaynote.com - Ballmer just opened the Second Envelope

"Come to think of it, Steve Numero Uno might very well heap praise on Mi-
crosoft’s CEO, he likes him just the way he is: with enemies like Ballmer,
who needs friends?"

[Ike]

Ben Brooks - The Ballmer Days Are Over

"Short sighted behavior like this can and should be forgiven if the person
later recognizes his errors and immediately moves to correct it, yet again
though it took three years to get a serious iPhone competitor out of Micro-
soft. They never created a music/video player that gained traction after
the Zune faded into Wikipedia archives. That cannot and should not be
forgiven."

[delovski]

cnet - The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet

"Microsoft counted on Allard, more than any other senior executive in the
last decade, to help it figure out how to reach the types of consumers who
are now racing to buy iPads.

Once an Internet wonk who helped a mid-1990s Microsoft wake up to the
Web, Allard led the team that created Microsoft's biggest non-PC consumer
success story--the Xbox video game business. Always willing to stand up
to leadership, Allard successfully argued that Windows wasn't suitable to
power the video game console, something Gates wasn't initially keen on."

"We were on the cusp of something really big," said one Courier team member.

"In late 2009, before the iPad had launched, the Courier team recogni-
zed the market for tablets was ready to explode. It laid out a detailed
engineering schedule and made the case to Microsoft's top brass that
Courier could be a revolutionary device that would define a new pro-
duct category. The team put forward a vision that Microsoft could cre-
ate a new market rather than chasing down a leader or defending an
established product.

[Ike]

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7x8jz1/the_former_head_of_windows_and_office_steven/

The former head of Windows and Office [Steven Sinofsky] explains Apple at scale better than most Apple pundits.