Today we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Macintosh Business Unit here at Microsoft. I was there when the Business Unit was created, so I thought I’d share some of my memories about that time, way back when. When I was first hired as a contractor to help test, I was […]
Ever laconic Seth Godin posts on what he sees in demand these days: We don’t need pilots. We need instigators and navigators, rabble rousers and innovators. People who can’t follow a checklist to save their life, but invent the future every day. I don’t think Seth really understands what it means to be a great […]
There’s been some talk recently about how MacBU might better develop software, and it reminded me of this story: A long time ago in a faraway village lived a man who everyone did their very best to avoid. He was the type of person who believed that there was only one competent person in the […]
I just read this by Michael Bolton on testing, but I think it has more general application: It occurs to me this evening that when test plans, test scripts, and testers look for particular problems with excessive focus, they do so at the expense of peripheral vision. Contrast that with what Adam Richardson says about […]
Consider this summary of the story of a horse named Snowman by Joseph B. Wirthlin: Harry de Leyer was late to the auction on that snowy day in 1956, and all of the good horses had already been sold. The few that remained were old and spent and had been bought by a company that […]
This is part 3 in my “Blogs I Read” series. I hope you find it useful. ADC Headlines – Apple – Feed I find it really useful to keep on top of the new documentation that is added to Apple’s Developer Connection website. I’ll often find something new I didn’t know, but mostly just seeing […]
I just found out that today is World Usability Day, and I couldn’t help from laughing at the poster. Yeah, usability really matters. Enjoy. 🙂
I recently listened to a BYU Devotional in which LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley simply related from his life “Experiences Worth Remembering.” One of the last experiences he shared was this: I had a long remembered experience with Mr. Shimon Peres of Israel. He was a former Prime Minister. He had seen much of […]
It’s funny, here at Microsoft when we finish a project, we “release to manufacturing” which is implied to mean that we carry the “golden copy” of the product to the replication factory which they then use to manufacture millions of packaged copies for everyone. This manufacturing might start right away, but most people will not […]
“Don’t worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you’re ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken, IBM Engineer This is my favorite quote for the day. Innovation, with all the ideas and execution that it requires, fails to happen for so many reasons, but most common […]
David Weiss 