August 31, 2005

Press- PC Magazine Reviews Network Magic 1.0

A great review of Network Magic 1.0 came out in PC Magazine's online site today. When you have spoken with the press and know these things are under-way, its can be somewhat nerve-wracking since you never get to see the results until it hits the public. Will they "get it"? Or will they somehow miss out on seeing the key value of the product you have been working for so long on. Especially in a new product category its often an open question what the expectations should be for feature set and more- you can sometimes get a bad review for just not meeting those expectations that you didn't even realize exist (because you think of the category differently).

Reading the review its pretty clear to me that Craig Ellison does "get it". I love some of the key quotes like "Extremely simple to set up and use" and the observation that Windows really does fail when it comes to making file sharing and printer sharing work for home users. Sometimes this is really hard for us to communicate since especially the early-adopter types all know that Windows "already does sharing". Sure it does, but do you really want to type Start/Run \\dencomputer\public or spend hours wrestling with setting up access controls on those shares? Ellison tunes into this key point when he observes that "the real magic begins when you install the software on additional Windows computers" ... "and unlike manually setting up sharing in Windows where you have to browse through the network to find shared resources, with Network Magic you don't have to do anything to see the shared drives."

August 26th, 2005

Pure Networks- Network Magic 2.0 beta

Whew. Its been almost 6 months that I've been here and we just shipped the Network Magic 2.0 beta. Its far from perfect but that's the nature of these things- you need to get the product out there to get some real world experience with it and feedback.

Network Magic 2.0 (our internal code-name is Mandalay...) is pretty cool. The key new feature is Net2Go which lets you just share out some folders of whatever on your local network and you can get to them from any web browser. You can setup public folders that you can share with other people on the Internet (see my site here) or any of your other stuff is available to you with a password.

As a technology guy the cool part goes beyond the actual UI here. We have an Apache server running inside your network that really knows about all your key stuff and that is accessible from the web. From here we can build all kinds of cool web apps and web-services for communicating between machines.

To celebrate shipping we had a little wine and cheese (and meat) party. I went with Australian wines as the theme to honor our test manager Joel who is from Australia, and highlighted a bottle of the 2003 Mitolo G.A.M. (one of my favorites). John picked up the cheese and meat from Whole Foods. We actually got to the sign off late because we had an afternoon rebuild and Joel insisted on giving the build real due-diligence. That's what makes him a great test manager so its hard to complain, although I did let people start with the refreshments before we had the final sign-off.

August 5, 2005

Travel- SEATAC

Tons of stuff to write about- the trip to Glacier, a rose that didn't suck, the great Australian tasting, writing cool Power Toys at work. But since I'm sitting here I'll write a bit about the new Seattle airport renovations. For it seems like the past year there were parts of the airport that were shut off as they were building something and I've been expecting the usual commercial lots of crap-stores mess. My flight today is delayed two hours and we got here a bit early anyway (it turns out Alex-Air could have practically gotten us there faster to Toledo).

It turns out the new area is quite nice. They set up these great glass windows with a perfect view of the runways. Almost no airport ever gets this right. There is a line of nice chairs here, and finally SEATAC has a good wireless connection. You have to pay $10 for a day so its not nearly as cool as the free Jet-Blue stuff in NY, but its way better than nothing. The food nearby even appears slightly above average, but in any case the key is that its just a nice place to sit, watch planes and work if you get stuck for a couple of hours. The only thing that could make it better would be a bunch of convenient power outlets.

Got a chance to see the Blue Angels twice yesterday- once in their initial passes from the roof our our building and once during their practice session from down by the lake. In the first thing the two soloists were doing some formation flying with a bi-plane and a Seneca (I think). The Seneca was being a photo plane and the Seattle Times has an awesome picture from the shoot on the cover this morning.

At work I've had a couple of interesting chats with our two new recruiters. We realized that our jobs site is just really underwhelming in talking about the cool stuff we are doing here. I have a bunch of PM openings, and we have a ton of job opportunities for devs and SDETs that we are trying to fill. I've got a couple of great candidates but there are still a bunch of more positions, and compared to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay or even Microsoft I don't think we have done a good job making clear what cool technologies we all work on.

Part of the problem is that when you look at our product the way it is now you probably just see the surface. Our network map is cool, and its great how easy it makes it to share printers and file shares. But we don't do a good job at all communicating how we have a p2p agent protocol that talks between your machine, syncing information about all of your machines. We also have a unique set of technology to identify and communicate with home network devices (especially routers) and develop all kinds of protocol stuff and some neat "beyond your home network" applications. Beyond that we also have a great set of UI tools that help us rapidly put together great consumer UI. Working here I get to play with this stuff and while I don't write production code, the stuff I can do from C# is just awesome. Of course all these bits and pieces also have a long way to go and there are tons of great hard software problems to solive. As a dev it would like being in a candy-shop. Hopefully as we roll out some more of this stuff in public it should also help recruiting some.

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