shahine.com/omar/

Dennis Cheung, someone that I interviewed for his first job out of college, and someone who I managed for a while in MacBU, announced that he is leaving the MacBU for the MSN Desktop Search Team.

I seriously dig the hard work and attitude of the Desktop Search Team. They run one of the best dogfood programs inside Microsoft. Many Microsoft teams open up their product to internal Microsoft folks for "dogfooding". For those of you unfamiliar with that word, it's essentially using pre-beta and sometimes outright buggy software on a daily basis in order to vet out bugs, design issues, and solicit feedback. Some programs are better than others, and excellent dogfood programs are a sign to me that the team is excited, committed, and interested in shipping the best product. Devoting resources to an internal dogfood program are not insignificant, but doing so successfully often means that when you ship you have an army of folks who not only love your product (because they feel that their hard work is also shipping) but are also evangelists for your product.

Anyway, I have a lot of respect for the team Dennis is moving to, and I really expect great things from that product in the future. As I've mentioned before, I feel really good when MacBU veterans leave for other groups at Microsoft because I know that they always take along the pixie dust that made MacBU products so special.