Saturday, April 23, 2005

Starbucks coffee notes podcast with Phil Torrone of Make Mag, and Beth Goza of Microsoft, in Kirkland, WA. 

Client and Server: "If belly-achin' were baseball, Seattle would be the Dominican Republic and the Yankees all in one." 

Don Park: "What is the point of wearing a skirt if you are going to wear underwear?" 

In defense of Vic's company 

Vic Gundotra: In defense of the company I love.

I just spent a half-week at Microsoft, jammed full of meetings and ideas and brilliance, more of my energy and intelligence was used in these 2.5 days than usually is used in a full month of my time. In my experience, this only happens at Microsoft. I don't know why. Harvard is not so intense, Silicon Valley pushed me very far away; when I used to visit IBM in the 80s they would put me in a hermetically sealed room in Boca Raton and people would fly from Texas and California to meet with me.

There's a lot of good at Microsoft. It shares ideas, takes risks, and while they second-guess themselves all the time like the huge company they are, there's still a shred of the balls-out seat-of-the-pants let's-get-it-done attitude in which the company was founded.

I've been visiting Microsoft since 1981. There is something consistent, even as they grew so remarkably and there's a lot to admire and respect in the people and culture of the company.

On the other hand, I still am very angry with Microsoft for its attack of the Web in the 90s. But their presence in technology is so huge, that's only one side of it. Without Microsoft, these days, there would be no balance to Google, no reason for Google to grow up and believe me, we're waiting for them to do just that, as we waited for Netscape.

I wish Microsoft hadn't screwed up SOAP, but at least they didn't screw with XML-RPC. And I absolutely adore the gentle and respectful way they've adopted RSS.