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Chip in the back of head 2006 - Day One.

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As promised, I'm blogging from my annual "chip in the back of the head".  I'm over in Seattle attending a Microsoft, internal only, technical readiness conference (TechReady).

Today, the first day of the event, didn't have much / any technical content - it was a "role day", where Microsoft people in the same role gather together and discuss what it is we do and what we should be doing better.  We did have a couple of great keynote presentations from Steve Ballmer and Kevin Turner (Steve Ballmer called them: "the least technical thing you're going to do all week").

Steve spent his time framing the event by sharing his "confidence, passion and enthusiasm" and reminding us that we do well because we innovate in the right areas (which are pretty much everything): The Core Platform and User Experience, Business & E-commerce, Information Access & Organisation, Entertainment, Analysis, IT & Dev Platform / Tools, Communication Collaboration & Expression.  He covered what we have done over the last five years and shared with us the direction for the next five.  He called out where our competition is and closed by calling out the fantastic new products that we will be releasing over the next 12 to 18 months.

Kevin Turner, our new chief operating officer, told us why he joined Microsoft:  He loves our mission statement (which is "enabling people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential") and the fact that we all work for a company where we're all part of something that is bigger that ourselves.  Our values (integrity and honesty, open and respectful, big challenges, passion, accountable, and self-critical) offered him something to aspire to and something that he would enjoy working towards.  He then reminded us what the company stands for and what we (the technical people within Microsoft) should be focusing on.

We did get a chance for a Q&A session with both Steve and Kevin, but because this is an internal event, I won't tell you any of the detail (suffice to say that they were asked some very difficult questions and gave some very open and honest responses).

Something I will share (because I'm sure we all know it), is the fact that Microsoft are putting a lot of effort into making our search technologies world class.  So on that note, here's my tip for today: Go to https://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/default.mspx and download our free desktop search tool and give it a try.  It's not just for home use, it's enterprise ready and comes with Group Policy templates for centralised management.

That's all for today,

Dave.

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