Category: General

On Friday night my wife and I were lucky to be able to watch Derren Brown's new show Svengali at the Edinburgh Playhouse. The whole audience were sworn to secrecy, so I can't tell you any more about the contents of the gig, but an interesting thing happened at the interval. Two early-twenties women were … Continue reading Antisocial networking

I've just been reading a Gartner article (http://bit.ly/kEHFsr) from last summer about consumerization, and it's made me realise another key difference between traditional IT outsourcing models and Cloud commoditization. Having seen a few big outsourcing projects over the years (and still bearing the scars, to be honest), the trap is that whilst clients are looking … Continue reading Inflexible Outsourcing

Achievements this week included: - getting my head around the new performance management and rewards mechanisms being introduced later in the year (saves me having to understand the old ones, I guess) - reviewing the "Star Wars" customer segmentation model - muddling through a particularly unpleasant stomach bug Next week: - hopefully more "business as … Continue reading Weeknote 48: A short week, shortened

A fairly significant outage for Amazon EC2 in North American over the past week has generated a pile of press coverage - mostly, it has to be said, because the incident took out a number of high-profile social networking sites including Quora and FourSquare. There are a few things I take away from this: 1) … Continue reading Reports of the death of the Cloud are greatly exaggerated

Project achievements this week included: - beginning the FY12 planning process - planning for a potential Cloud Circle appearance And also: - further meetings with various people across the team and beyond - quarterly review meetings with the product business groups - realising that I might need to change the structure of my weeknotes as … Continue reading Weeknote 47: Planning begins

The rapidly changing IT world in which we find ourselves is one where "traditional" thoughts about who is what are being challenged on a regular basis (as an aside, it still tickles me that we have concepts of "traditional" anything in IT, but there you go...). By way of example: Microsoft regards people who use … Continue reading Metamorphosis

There was a great bit of stage show at the MIX 2011 event in Las Vegas last week as the launch of the Kinect SDK was demoed (see it here http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/C9Team/Kinect-Demos-with-the-Channel-9-team. For those of you who don't know, Kinect is a USB device that enables the Xbox games platform (or, when the SDK ships, PCs) … Continue reading Interacting with the machine

Project achievements this week included: - completing all of my mandatory e-learning modules - meetings with further members of the immediate and extended team - sitting in my first "Rhythm of the Business" meeting (and understanding some of what was being talked about) And also: - up and running with a pool car... - ... … Continue reading Weeknote 46: beginning to understand things

A week and a half in, I thought it was about time that I explained what it is that I've joined Microsoft to do. I'm working in a group based in Microsoft UK's Reading HQ that is called Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE). The mission of the group is to spread the word about the … Continue reading My new role