Some random thoughts to share that I jotted down while half alseep on the train at 7:15 this morning.
There’s been a lot of churn in people who work in the company the last few weeks, both in terms of hiring and people moving on. In the last few weeks we’ve had new developers, testers and PMs start in Hotmail and have people move on to our competitors and to start ups. A year ago, the rate at which people were moving through the origination was much slower. The faster rate definitely gives me the feeling that the tech economy is picking up moving forward again.
There’s also that huge reorg that happened earlier this week, on the eve of today’s company meeting. My division, MSN, has been moved in to the uber-organization that includes Windows. I’m not certain what to think about it, so I’ll withhold (public) judgment until it has some impact on my job or our work in Hotmail. It’ll likely be a good thing, helping us deliver software as a service and this whole “Web 2.0” thing that everybody seems to be blogging about these days.
The company meeting is today in Safeco Stadium in Seattle. In fact, when I was an intern four years ago I was able to go. We were shipped from campus in 100s of busses over the sound to the stadium where all the big guys, like Gates, Ballmer, and the VPs give product demos, go over some financials, and do a very intense amount of cheerleading. The coolest part of the meeting is the product fair where all the groups have tables setup to give demos of what they’re working on. Since I’m based in Mountain View, CA we’re getting the presentations via webcast but we’re having our own fair on our campus. The Kahuna team will be manning the Kahuna booth in a grass skirts.