The Coachella 2007 line up is out. My first reaction is a simple two words-

HAPPY MONDAYS!!!!

Of course reunions like that usually suck, and live they were supposed to be hit or miss anyway, so I’ll have appropriate expectations. That doesn’t
diminish how exciting it is… And with the news coming on a Monday, what I can say, its a really happy Monday.

Oh, and the Jesus and Mary Chain too. Interpol. The Arcade Fire. Tapes n’ Tapes. LCD Soundsystem. Soulwax. Kaiser Chiefs. And tons more. As usual the main
attraction isn’t the bands I recognize, its the cool new bands out there that I haven’t heard yet.

Looking forward to it! And then off to Mix 07 early Monday morning.

I’ll try to post a list of Emusic bands that will be playing shortly.

 

Another big link today, this time from the folks at Ajaxian. I sit here wondering
if saying thank you for a link makes me not cool. Kind of like the person who is over star-struck meeting a famous person or something. Personally
I’m not terribly fond of the automated trackbacks (plus, spam has limited their usefulness) and it’s the interconnectedness that makes the web work so I’m
going to do it anyway. Thank you Dion!

The combination of the new interest in that write up and a conversation with a client yesterday of course reminds me of another good story. As we
were developing Exchange 2000 / Outlook Web Access we would meet with Bob Muglia pretty much every week. At the time Bob was our senior VP and was
running a pretty huge organization (I think including all of Office). The amazing thing was that despite the size of his organization he managed to
still be very involved. Execs that combined the ability to get it when they saw something important and at the same time inspire people to drive
hard made that a very exciting place to work.

Outlook Web Access was very much a “catch up” project. We started about halfway through Exchange 2000, and were working very quickly to build as
much functionality as possible. Outlook has an incredibly deep feature set including tasks, this thing called the Journal, and of course tons of
contacts and calendar features. At this point we had gotten the basic mail part working but not much else.

I don’t know how he pulled it off, but when we showed Bob a demo of the mail stuff, he managed to do this really cool thing. He managed to show
how enthusiastic he was about what we had pulled off so far. And at the same time somehow he challenged us something along the lines of “of course
contacts are hard, you probably can’t have contacts working quickly”. The next week we demoed the contact list and again, he was enthusiastic, but of
course the “card” view would be tricky. We managed to go for quite some time and every week Jim and Bob somehow managed to pull off a whole major
section of the application into good enough shape for me to demo it.

I’m pretty sure that Bob and Gord Mangione (our GM) knew the difference between getting something to the point where you can demo it vs. shipping
to enterprise customers. Getting this stuff polished and out the door was a huge effort and considerably less glamorous than those rapid development
days, but I don’t think we would have made it to there without the special kind of encouragement we had at the outset. There is a special balance
you need to strike as a manager to create the right atmosphere so that people feel challenged but not overburdened.

Too often the relationship between a development team and their management is some adversarial one where the development team feels
they need to push back on schedules and challenges. I think one of the sources of this problem rests in our assumptions that software
like other engineering disciplines should be something you can accurately schedule. Developers that can come in on time are thought of
as more professional. Plus, I get how difficult it can be to plan a marketing launch or other business issues that need lots of advance
notice when your developers can’t predict how long it will take to finish.

The sad fact is that as a developer I really dislike being pushed to make an accurate estimate of how long a project is going to take,
and as a program manager I dislike having to push my development team for accurate estimates. It takes the right developers, but if your
business and team can support it, you can get lots more done by not having a fixed schedule, tackling projects incrementally with nice
bite sized steps, and just driving hard to get them done as quickly as possible. Sometimes you will hit roadblocks and something will take
longer than expected, but this model doesn’t leave you feeling guilty for missing some arbitrary schedule and encourages people to think
of different ways around the problem.

In other news I’m thrilled to see that the new version of Prototype, 1.5 is now available. I’ve
enjoyed using this library quite a bit to make Javascript much easier to deal with. I haven’t seen any good summary of what has changed
in the new version yet, stay tuned.

Dare Obasanjo linked to my Story of XmlHttp this morning. It will be interesting to observe how much traffic a popular blog with great Google rankings like his creates. Given that good links are the currency of the web, I owe Dare a big thank you. And of course for any new visitors today, welcome.

The funny thing is that my first reaction was to be a bit stressed out. XmlHttp itself was a fairly small
project as such things go, but even the smallest things at Microsoft need the contributions of so many people to pull them off. I’m confident that I forgot to mention many important people who helped and I hope they aren’t too offended.

Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2000 was in many ways a much bigger accomplishment and of course the acknowledgement list for that project would have to be much much longer. XmlHTTP was just one small missing piece that helped pull off what is now called the Ajax architecture, but OWA is the place where the techniques to use it and to really build rich applications in the web browser really came together.

One interesting story- while we were developing Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2000, we were stressed that the rich version only worked for IE5 which had just barely shipped and was not widely deployed, especially in enterprise. We had an HTML 3.2 version that could run with any web-browser, but we not sure about the reaction we would get from our top customers to the IE5 requirement for the best experience. One thing that I thought was great about working in the Exchange team was that I had lots of opportunity to present to these big enterprise customers and meet with their CIOs and top Exchange administrators in person. These guys surprised us- I probably did a couple of dozen presentations to these guys and never once did I get any pushback on the IE5 thing. The more common reaction was that they saw so much value in having a server-driven app like Outlook Web Access that they said they were going to push up IE5 deployments to make sure all of their employees could access it. It does go to show that when you build a compelling platform and show the specific
business justification, the deployment happens easily, and the IE and Trident teams deserve a ton of credit for having stuck with that vision for dynamic HTML applications for such a long time.

It is pretty amazing to me the sorry state of the TV networks taking advantage of the Internet as a distribution
medium. The only real excuse is that most people don’t have a computer hooked up to a TV yet so they can’t really
watch TV programming sent via their computer. Still, with a set of early adopters all over it, you would think someone
would get in front of this trend.

So far the best solution I’ve found is Amazon Unbox. Unbox is cool enough that I’m planning on cancelling
some of the premium channels on cable and just getting individual programs via Unbox. While I felt that $2 per
program was too much for TV (its still too much for 30min programs, they need to price differentiate more),
when I look at how many programs I can buy a month and still save over the Comcast
subscription, it becomes easier to justify. Plus I get real DVD quality content, better than most broadcast HD
and I get to replay anytime at that quality.

The other night we went to watch the latest CSI episode and discovered that the recorded version was trash. Somewhere
between the Media Center and the HD broadcast antenna the results were jumpy and cut out. Since CSI is one of the programs
available on Unbox I went there to get the program. This was a day after the broadcast but the new episode wasn’t online
yet. This I really don’t get- hey, if I’m paying $2 to watch it, they should pretty much have it available online
before the normal broadcast time if anything.

However a quick visit to the CBS web-site saved me. They have this new video player they call the InnerTube
that has full episodes of most of the shows available a couple of hours after the west-coast air time. They
force you to watch a couple of ads, but thankfully they are fairly brief (although they crank up the volume even
worse than normal broadcast ads do).

The quality isn’t as good as Amazon but its almost as good as broadcast/cable after you PVR it.
Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. Now if someone had a $20/month
subscription service that would give me all the HD quality video of TV shows I want…