Technology- The BillG Review
With Bill announcing his impending retirement it seems like all the blogs
with any link to Microsoft are taking the opportunity to reminisce. Having been
lucky enough to witness/occasionally participate in many BillG reviews, I
suppose I’d be negligent to miss the opportunity. At their best, a BillG review
was an exciting opportunity to see some long-term, big picture strategy and
watch projects and technologies get put through the ringer.
Joel Spolsky’s post does a great job summing up how cool a good BillG review
could be. By the time I started Bill was already getting a bit further from the
technology- Microsoft had grown to the point where he rarely had time to dive
into writing notes on the margin’s of specs. Sometimes these could be pretty
frustrating, but I realized over time that one of Bill’s great gifts was the
ability to look at things over a 5+ year timeframe. The catch is that the words
didn’t always come out that way so it was easy to get upset when Bill was
critiquing some part of your strategy or product. By adding a “within 5-7 years”
at the end of statements things often became less confusing and distracting.
My favorite quote,
and I’m never going to forget this one was “I can’t believe that anyone with any
f**king IQ is thinking about this problem”. The statement was directed at my
bosses, but if I recall correctly the person working on the problem was me…
On a side note, Barbecues.com
is having a 10% sale this weekend. I’m going to
look into stocking up on some of the
bisquettes for my Bradley Smoker and this
seems like a reasonable place to pick one up if you don’t have one already.
Compared to a pit smoker it may be cheating but it makes it WAY easier to make
nice BBQ.
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