Alex Hopmann’s Blog

This morning at about 5:30am there were two gigantic thunder-claps. Apparently the National Weather Service said Seattle had an episode of “thundersnow” around 5:30 a.m. when a storm cell moved across Puget Sound. I’ve never seen anything like it and it doesn’t seem like our weather patterns would have matched any of the normal descriptions of how it occurs.

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.

Two pieces of good news Via Guy Kawasaki’s latest post. First of all, Wagamama is apparently opening a branch in Boston.
Sounds like its time to start campaigning for a Seattle presence. Tastingmenu has a write up on Wagamama that gives
a good feel for what is so cool about this. The bottom line is they just seem to “get it” on many levels. Good
food, nothing too complex, nice high-tech ordering, a great experience.

Guy also brings us news that a UK start-up called SpinVox is bringing email delivery of voice mail to cell-phones.
I’ve pretty much always hated voice-mail. It has always felt like this huge disruptive context switch for me to
go listen to some messages, make sure I have someplace to take notes, and all that. I’m much happier communicating
in email, IM, or in-person meetings that by telephones and voice-mail, but of course I need to be able to adapt
to how other people what to communicate also.

First of all its incredibly stupid that I can’t get my Verizon cell-phone voicemail delivered to my email inbox
as voice attachments. Email systems like Exchange have had this capability for at least 6 or 7 years and really it shouldn’t be hard at all to just configure the voice-mail system to send me an email. But the SpinVox goes a step further and translates the voice message to text. From my perspective this is perfect since everyone can operate in the medium
that they prefer and still get along just fine.

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