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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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,…
When I joined the Windows setup team in Oct. of 2001, Windows Whistler (what would become Windows XP) was already at beta 2. A rapid release tucked in after Windows 2000, which was well-received by business customers but was nowhere near customer ready, the goal of Windows XP would be creating the first Windows NT-based OS for consumers. VP Jim Allchin’s mantra was “It just works,” which we sometimes jokingly said as “It juuuust works.” Humor aside, Windows XP would…
Windows XP was the first version of Windows that didn’t ship with boot floppies. It only shipped with a CD. Yes, you could download a tool that would build a few boot floppies for you if your computer didn’t support El-Torito boot for some reason, but most computers that ran XP happily at the time that we shipped also supported CD boot. So even as XP launched in late 2001, the writing was on the wall for the floppy diskette….
Intel may have had the best of intentions for the Itanium architecture. However, from the very first day I sat down and tried to use one after I joined the Windows team, I found it frustrating. It was loud, slow, and hot. Just starting the notepad was slow. It was a hot, angry pig. (And not even a fast pig like a javalina.) Itanium was designed to be a brand new platform for high-end workstations and servers. The x86 instruction…