Category: Themes

There has been a lot of coverage in the last 12 months or so about the impact that "Apps" are having on the world. Most of the attention has been focused on the mobile world, but already today there are a number of competing marketplaces for the sale and/or distribution of software to different platforms. … Continue reading Marketplaces

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