We missed the boat but we've got a new hope

Three quick random things.

A New Hope? I was sent an email that it would be worthwhile to check out Chris Jones' internal blog. For Microsofties on the intranet, it's at http://blogs/chrisjo/ . Wow. He tackles some hard questions, ranging from work-life balance to VP-compensation to the Mini-Microsoft blog (hello, Mr. Jones). His answers give me hope. I look forward to the answers turning into results.

Goodbye Ward: Ward Cunningham has left to work at Eclipse (and I tell you: given the slow .NET encumbered beast that VS 2005 is, even I'm tempted to try out Eclipse right now). I first stumbled across it on edjez's So Long Ward post. Not to be overly snarky, but there goes another geek trophy wife. An... interesting hire in the first place. I'd be interested in knowing if there's a reason he moved on vs. just being plain more excited about Eclipse than anything he was able to do at Microsoft.

I hope rather than going out and looking for the next high-profile geek trophy wife that Microsoft takes a moment of reflection to ask why is it, given that we've hired so many great people and have so many wonderful researchers, that we haven't produced beloved super-star geeks. What is it about our culture?

Uh, Oh: Joe Wilcox questions whether the late Vista has missed a special nodal-point of increased PC purchases. Going into next week's quarterly earning's report, Mr. Wilcox reflects:

In July I asked the question: "Did Microsoft miss a major PC and operating system upgrade cycle? I won't say definitely until the third calendar quarter is finished and buying trends for the year clearer to assess. But my initial reaction is to say yes." Increasingly I'm convinced that Microsoft would have been much better off shipping Windows Vista in 2005 than late 2006.

Oh, yeah. Muuuuuch better. I'm sure everyone working on getting Vista out the door realizes, too, that Microsoft's stock price is directly coupled to their day-to-day success.