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After I graduated from college, I briefly sold Volkswagens. As I’ve pondered the metamorphosis of Windows from a desktop-focused to a tablet-focused operating system, I keep reliving an experience with a specific customer during that time. This customer came in, and when engaged, said – perhaps unsurprisingly, “I want to buy a car”. I asked him what kind of car he was looking for. He replied, “either a VW Cabrio or a Toyota pickup”. I’d heard customers thinking of a…

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I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently trying to get to know PowerShell. I’ve never been a developer, but I did write a fair amount of Windows Script Host (WSH) both at Microsoft and since then – much to the chagrin of some of the developers I worked with. The more time I’ve spent with PowerShell, Windows Server 2012, and Windows 8, the more I’ve realized that we’re at the beginning of something pretty unusual – in a way,…

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Many years ago, when I worked at Microsoft, I took a trip with a person several rungs up my management chain to talk to a software vendor. The purpose of our trip was to figure out what could be achieved if we worked more closely together with them, as they were filling a gap for our customers that we did not (and couldn’t for at least the foreseeable future). I still recall at lunch that day, when  one of their…

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In January of 2011, I wrote my first suppositions about “Windows 8” and the ARM processor architecture. Though we now know the version of Windows that will land on ARM will be called Windows RT, and the Windows 8 name will be reserved for editions of the operating system that will run on x86/x64 processors. In that blog post early last year, I stated: Microsoft has never sustained Windows on any platform besides x86. What would make Windows on ARM…

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In 1998, while on vacation, I recall having an idea about a new kind of computer. A computer where you could  use it as a laptop, or flip the display around and use it with your fingers. I let the idea pass, since I figured it was novel, but nobody would pay a premium price for such a device. Several years later, I recall when Windows Tablet PC was in it’s infancy, seeing a convertible Tablet PC, and thinking, “maybe…

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On Friday Morning, Splashtop introduced a new application, the Win8 Metro Testbed – powered by Splashtop. With both of the releases of Windows 8 so far, a key criticism of mine has been how hard it is to fairly evaluate the OS without a device that supports touch properly. Where Windows 7 is a desktop OS that offers little value when used with touch, Windows 8 is so touch-centric that evaluating it with only a keyboard and mouse is, I believe,…

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I don’t have a Ph.D. in ergonomics. I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But still, I have to say, I have to disagree with Jakob Nielsen in his blog post. Jakob states that if you build a mobile site (and he recommends that you do), that you redirect users to it automatically. This is not that different from the incredibly annoying tendency of sites to offer you their mobile app with the persistence that the talking toaster from…

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For most of my career at Microsoft, I worked as a Program Manager on Windows Setup. No, not the Windows installer. Windows Setup – the tools and technologies that took a computer either from an earlier version of Windows or a bare PC, to an installation of Windows. But in this role, I still had to deal with the ramifications of how Windows applications were installed, and often would see the work of other teams incorporated into Windows setup –…

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