Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
I ran across this post on the Humanized Weblog about the trends in the Software world. As a contributor to at least one open source project (dasBlog) and a employee at a company that professionally makes software and part of a team that does a "service" I can 100% relate to what he is saying .
"Making software easy to use is hard; and the people who make free software generally don't have much motivation to make it easy for anyone but themselves."
In many cases the most expensive and labor intensive part of making software are some of the more artistic aspects of making it usable. Some developers have very good intuition about what this is, and many do not. Many people I've worked with in my career had great intentions but were surprised when they saw the result of what they've built (including myself).
Now, I've seen(and use) a ton of fantastic, usable, popular "open source" and "free" software. But there is truth in the post referenced.