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In 1948, Cadillac introduced their first car with tailfins. Arguably some other cars may have had tailfins prior to that car, but the tailfin war is pretty much agreed to have begun with that Cadillac and its tiny little tailfins. Over the next 20 years, fins would grow, shift, move sideways, and become a bizarre design element across most of the auto industry, Even Mercedes-Benz wasn’t immune to this design trend, featuring “fintails” or “peilstege” until 1968 on four-door sedans,…

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“Nobody remembers a pause.” – Precise author unknown In my job, I give webinar presentations, do podcasts, and regularly teach courses online and in person. Today, I regularly get feedback that people enjoy my pace, my voice (like I can control that), and it just seems really relaxed and I seem casual. That definitely wasn’t always the case. Sometimes people are surprised to hear me say that I used to be a nervous presenter, but I very much was. Don’t…

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Chris had always loved garage sales. Especially on Saturday mornings before the good stuff had been looted. When he was really young, his grandfather Curtis had taken him to his first garage sale. This trip became one of many as they explored one garage sale after another for the next 20 years. It was at those early garage sales that Chris discovered the magic of secondhand things. Things that have been previously loved but now needed a new home. As…

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I thought multiple times over the last month about Windows Recall vs. WinFS. But not in the way that you might think. As Windows Recall went from overhyped feature to almost gone, I couldn’t stop comparing the two. But again, not in the way that you might think. I pondered creating a list of similar traits to these two overwrought pieces of infrastructure sold as life-changing. However, WinFS and Recall aren’t the same thing, and they weren’t intended to do…

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In my last post, I mentioned how at least for the team I worked on, that Windows releases typically needed to reflect how they aligned with the needs of three customer segments; OEMs who build PCs, businesses who run Windows, and retail customers who would buy it off the shelf to run on their own home PC. I lied. Well, I simplified. For our team, that was true. For some Windows client teams, they may have only had an OEM…

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When people would ask me what it was like working on Windows, I would sometimes say, “It’s like a church potluck. You bring a dessert, another team brings macaroni and cheese, and another team brings the tomato aspic.” Even though nobody ever asked for tomato aspic. When I joined the setup team in Windows in Oct. 2000, I didn’t know exactly what my role would be day to day, just that I’d been hired in as a program manager to…

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When another human tells you something, you may question it. When a machine tells you something, you likely take it as the gospel truth. On the 1980’s American TV show, “Cheers”, the character Cliff Clavin, a mailman played by actor John Ratzenberger, often doles out facts as if they were known truths.? He would say, “It’s a little known fact…” followed by something that you might or might not believe to be true. Over time, “It’s a little known fact”…

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Multiple times per year, I receive unsolicited email from random people – typically from consumer-class email addresses – asking if my domain (this domain – getwired.com) is for sale. To answer the question bluntly; no, it’s not for sale. To the people who will read that and then still want to ask me if it’s for sale… effectively everything has a price, right? I registered this domain name in Oct. 1995. That’s over 28 years ago. It was a great…

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When I was a kid, I was fascinated with cars. I used to joke that my first word was cat, which it was, but I meant to say car. I was fascinated every time I saw the hood up on a car. I didn’t understand how the machinery worked, I just knew they were fascinating to me.  I saw the hood open on my dad‘s car once when I was very young. It was a carbureted car, and I asked…

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When I started at Microsoft, there were two independent families of Windows. The consumer releases that were all DOS-based, and the business releases that were all NT-based. Until I joined the Windows team in 2000, I really didn’t understand the intricacies of having these two different ways of doing everything. In particular, with Windows XP being the melding point where all Windows releases became based off of the NT codebase, a ton of effort was spent in terms of setup,…

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