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Twelve Pounds Is A Lot of M&Ms

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It's a Microsoft custom on your hire-date anniversary to provide 1 pound of M&Ms for every year that you've been with the company. Today is my anniversary. I started at Microsoft on June 21, 1993 (yeah that's right 93). A lot has changed in the last 12 years. At the time, Microsoft was still shipping Windows 3.1, Visual Basic 3.0, and Visual C++ 1.0. There were about 14000 employees, and Microsoft's revenue was $3.8 billion per year.

I actually did my first stint at Microsoft as an intern from Jan through Aug of 1992, working on Multimedia Viewer, which was the platform on which Encarta and some of the other media titles were built on. I joined the same group as a full-time employee in June of 93, but they had moved on to creating multimedia authoring tools for interactive TV. Amazingly enough Microsoft started investigations into interactive TV back then, and we spent a year and a half working on prototypes and spinning our wheels, until that effort was disbanded and teams spunoff into other areas.

Our team continue working on media tools and eventually shipped Media Manager 1.0, which was a media content management system that plugged into the Windows 95 shell as an extension. It provided special properties for file types, and custom user-definable properties, a full-text indexing and search mechanism which included properties, a thumbnail view (along with the other explorer views) of the files, and an in-place player within the thumbnail view which let you play video and audio files, without having to open each one. I worked on the thumbnail view and the in-place players. Many of you are probably familiar with the thumbnail view, because it was eventually moved into the core explorer and today allows you to see previews of your photos.

Then, I worked on the Encarta World Atlas for about 3.5 years. In that time, we shipped 4 versions of our product -- we shipped on a yearly cycle targetting the back-to-school sales. Atlas was a lot of fun. We fit the world on a CD with rich, vivid map data and interesting content from around the world. The mapping engine was shared with the other geography products of the time: Streets and Trips. And, eventually evolved into MapPoint and the map server products that we provide today. For content display, we used an embedded IE window and HTML, which was a departure from the Encarta display technology (which was still based on a newer version of MediaView -- the product I originally worked on as an intern). My last year with the Encarta team was as the development lead for World Atlas.

Next, came a three year stint on the MSDN content creation team. We wrote in-depth technical articles and developed samples, like Duwamish 4.0, Duwamish Online, and a myriad of web service samples. Of note, the first Microsoft WebService Toolkit was created by our team in 2000. For the last 1.5 years there, I was the group manager for the content team with several writers and developers working for me, including Dr. GUI.

For the last 2.5 years, I've been working on Whitehorse and DSL Tools. I started working on the core design surface, which is the diagramming surface used by all of the VS2005 designers. This was long before we ever decided that the underlying core libraries would be documented and released for public consumption as DSL Tools. I also worked on the Application Designer making sure you could design distributed service-based applications with our designer. And, today I'm back fixing up the core libraries to make them more easily understandable and useable for people who want to create their own DSL designer.

See how quickly 12 years can add up... and pass...

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    A pound a month, well you have ample stock of M&Ms for one whole year .. luck you!!

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    Your career seems to have taken a more interesting turn each time it changed. Makes me curious as to what you'll be doing next...

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    Pieter,
    I plan to work on DSL tools for quite some time. There's still a lot to be done. Usually, I changed jobs because it started getting routine, and I wanted something new. But, DSL still has a long way to go...

    The best thing about working at Microsoft is that we encourage moving within the company. It helps spread knowledge throughout the company and keep people interested in working here. And, it's likely that Microsoft has a product group that's working on some technology that you're interested in.

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    Wow, you've been around and touched a lot of great projects.

    Hey, look at the bright side, at least it's not a pound of flesh for every year.

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2005
    It may have to be a pound of flesh after all of the M&Ms that I've been eating in the last couple of days.

    BTW, there are still plenty left...

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2005
    That really is a lot..lol cool post.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.livejournal.com/users/qiller_neu/1511.html

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    April 21, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.ljseek.ru/%D0%BA-%D0%B5_61156455.html

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    The comment has been removed