shahine.com/omar/

I’ve been dreading this day. Not because I am bummed or worried that Google launched a calendar, no… I was dreading this day because my inbox is now filled with “Hey did you see that Google launched a calendar”? Every single DL I’m on is linking to and discussing it. Um, no I haven’t noticed at all . Ugh… now everyone will want to know what we are building.

At least Dare has his thinking cap on.

I’m pretty excited that Niall is coming to help us build a RSS platform inside of Windows Live. I got to interview Niall and we had a great talk; I am convinced he’s the perfect guy for the job and I’m looking forward to working with him. Dare should get that referral bonus .

Since 1998 I’ve been driving an Audi. First was a 1998 A4 2.8 Wagon that I leased for 3 years. Then I got a 2002 A4 3.0 Sedan. I’ve loved every day we’ve owned it. We are about to move out of the city since Lora will be continuing her medical training at Stanford and we will need a second car. There are a lot of cars that I want but one car I’ve always wanted is the Audi allroad. It’s an SUV in the body of a sport wagon. Well they no longer sell them in the US due to the advent of the Q7, Audi’s new ugly SUV. So the allroad will be a European only offering since Audi doesn’t want to sell two SUV like cars to American’s. Bummer.

Anyway, I was looking around this past Friday and found that the Audi dealership in San Francisco had a few used 2002 allroads. I had to get one with a built in Nav system and Parktronic cause I currently have those on my A4 and can’t live without them. So that limits me to about 3 used cars in the entire bay area. Well one of those happened to be one I test drove on Saturday and we decided to buy it. It’s amazing how quick car transactions are. We signed the papers and walked out in about 20 min and picked up the car later in the day. It’s certified pre-owned so it comes with a warranty which is a big plus.

I love the car. It has a 250 hp V6 bi-turbo engine, and handles really well (it has speed sensitive steering which is really cool). Since it’s the same model year as our other Audi all the options are near identical but it’s got some we don’t have like tire pressure sensors, a heated steering wheel, pneumatic suspension that gives you up to 8 inches of ground clearance…. wicked cool.

I really love Audis. The Quattro 4 wheel drive is fantastic, the dealerships are great, and the fit and finish of the car is better than BMW IMHO. I also love buying used cars now! We saved a bundle.

Trevin has a post on a recent management training class he took at Microsoft.

This class is the replacement for a class that used to be called Management Essentials.

I took Management Essentials 3 years ago. It was the single biggest life changing event for me in the context of my professional career. Reasons why the class is amazing:

• The people. You are simply floored by the quality of the people and the rich discussions you’ll have.
• The instructors. Superb.
• The fun and competition. You play some really fun and competitive simulations.
• The immersive learning experience.
• The lack of email, and real “touch” with the real world.

Probably the biggest thing for me was the fact that it was the first time I was taken out of the context of my personal and work life and was able to view myself and what I was doing objectively. Sort of like a third person view into my life.

For me, that class was the beginning of many changes I would take in my life (including a new job at Microsoft). I really cherished the experiences I had, and the people I hung out with. It’s nothing short of amazing that Microsoft has this course.

If you are a manager at Microsoft, you should take this class about 2 years after you become a manager. And you should probably take it every 5 years.

A few weeks ago, Tom Raftery posted about his recent experiences with Hotmail in a post titled “Microsoft Hotmail, you suck!”

Tom states:

“Why am I annoyed? - Microsoft’s insistence that you have to log into Hotmail every 30 days or they delete all your info. I don’t use Hotmail much, but I have had my Hotmail account for years and there was tons of old email info in there. I logged in today (after obviously more than 30 days) and I find all my info has been deleted by Microsoft.”

…

“Why impose such a shortsighted policy of deleting people’s info after 30 days when your main competitors (Yahoo! and Gmail) don’t have any such policies as far as I know.”

Well everyone has some kind of policy. It just so happens that ours is really not ideal for so many reasons. This has been a constant pain point for our customers, and a problem that most of us working at Hotmail today simply inherited.

Is it acceptable? No. I apologized to Tom on his blog, but the reality is, we’ve lost Tom as a customer forever. Do I feel responsible in some way? Yes.

This policy is something many folks on my team have been working to address. It’s just one of many things about our service we are attempting to change. I’ll blog about some more changes coming pretty soon, but I would like to say that we have changed the policy for Windows Live Mail accounts to 120 day expiration. It’s not forever, but the reality is it cannot be forever (unless you are a premium user and pay a subscription). There are really valid business reasons for this.

Anyway, I’m glad we’ve made this change for Windows Live Mail user. As we migrate our user base to WLM everyone will benefit from the extended expiration times for accounts. For folks in many developing nations, as well as students who might not check their accounts in the summer, 120 days should protect their accounts much better than 30 days.

I just sent Tom a Windows Live Mail Invite to fix his storage issue and hopefully the expiration issue if he still cares to use the service. Sorry Tom!

One thing that I learned early in my career at Microsoft is that if you become the "go to guy" on your team, you get more visibility. More visibility helps you win at "the game". Why? Cause when people in your food chain or elsewhere in your company have never even met you, but you've been prompt and cordial with their communications to them, they are going to think you're a "good guy" and a "useful resource". As soon as you drop their email or question on the floor, you risk having the bozo bit flipped. This is especially true when you work in a remote campus and many of the folks you interact with are elsewhere.

Of course, actually meeting some one and getting to know them is much better, and once you build that trust communicating gets a lot different. But who has time for that? Microsoft is a culture where people in offices next door would rather email each other cause chances are you aren’t really in your office and who want to waste time finding out you aren’t there? Use the phone? hah!

Why am I writing this? cause Itzy has a good post on the topic.

Responsiveness tells me you have a handle on your job. Of course this doesn’t mean answer all your email on a Thursday night at 4 am. You risk trying to look like a Hero when you’re not. Respecting your own work life balance and that of others tells me you are on top of both your job and your life.

Of course there are going to be cases where dropping the email on the floor is the appropriate thing to do. This can be useful in cases where the question or nature of the question doesn’t even warrant a response. Chances are the question won’t ever be asked again cause it was never meant to be asked. You have to be careful when doing this, cause the last thing you want to do is burn bridges.

Leave it up to Apple finally acknowledge that they are in fact a hardware company. And what a great name for a product… Boot Camp will finally raise the bar for the PC OEMs. You are now on notice and either need to figure out how to make your commodity business work or risk losing all the folks like me who care what our PCees look and sound like. Any company that spends time designing a good power supply for a laptop in a market where no one else even thinks about that has a special place in my heart.

Imagine if we named this thing! It would be called: “Microsoft Windows XP Professional Boot Selector Beta for Windows and Macintosh Systems”. But Boot Camp says what it does in 2 words .

Kudos to Apple, especially Steve Jobs. Off to store.apple.com to find out what new shiny object I need for a computer. Maybe I’ll start with a mini.

What’s next? WMA support on the iPod? (don’t I wish)

I just loved this collection of quotes by Steve jobs.

I finally put v1 of Send RSS to OneNote up GotDotNet a few weeks ago but forgot to mention anything.

You can download it here.

For many years I have HATED and complained that when you Reply-All to an email sync'ed via Exchange ActiveSync, you get a copy of the message. No email product on the planet behaves this way. Typically when you reply-all to an email, your address is not included in the reply (the mail client filters you out from the to or cc line).

Well, long ago I filed a bug, and it was not fixed. The reasoning was always that when you use Exchange ActiveSync the device does not know your address (which is sort of true, it just knows your logon credentials). Either way it was annoying to get responses to emails that you replied to.

Well, on the Treo 650 using ActiveSync they had a clever solution. They asked you what your email address was . Now there is a cheap solution! It appears that when you install AKU2 for Windows Mobile 5 we finally get parity with the Treo 650! However, I never noticed because the dialog where you input your email address is hopelessly buried in ActiveSync->Menu->Options->E-mail->Settings->Advanced. There you can enter your primary e-mail address (note that it is case sensitive).

Note to the WM folks. Why not ask the user as part of account configuration?

Wohoo! Best bug fix, err, new feature evar!

[via Pocket PC Thoughts]

note: make sure you enter the email address that your mobile device sees on emails in your inbox. For example, my email address comes in two forms, my username at microsoft.com and FirstName.LastName at microsoft.com. I had to enter the latter in ActiveSync.

A few days ago I downloaded and installed SpeedFiler.

SpeedFiler is an add-in for Outlook that “turbocharges” a core aspect of email triage: Filing Messages.

I figure that I file about 30% of the email I receive. I probably reply and delete 50% and defer/create tasks out of the remainder.

I also have a few hundred folders in Outlook. Many of these folders are for Distribution Lists, and I never file to those. However, I have a Project Hierarchy detailed here and I file things there a few times a day. Doing so via Drag and Drop is inconvenient (because I usually keep the folder list collapsed) and the Outlook Move To drop down is to small and the dialog too limited (not all the folders are expanded and I can’t figure out what rules it uses for persisting state).

Anyway, SpeedFiler is a beauty of a program because it makes filing fast. Basically, SpeedFiler will override Outlook’s Move To Shortcut Keys and pop open it’s own dialog. Once open you just fire off a few characters in the folder name and it collapses the list of folders to any matches. This works great when you also have collisions (more than one folder with the same name) as it shows you all the matches with their full paths.

I happen to use SpeedFiler in conjunction with ClearContext. They actually compliment each other quite well. You see, when I file something into one of my Topic folders, CC automatically assigns a topic to that item. Since many of my topic names are things like “Hotmail/Kahuna” etc, I have to type the full path in CC’s Assign Topic button. This requires that I type most of the topic name, but with SpeedFiler I just type “Kah” and get a match. I can also file messages to any folders in Outlook (including those in my Hotmail account from Outlook Connector).

SpeedFiler has a another nifty feature which allows you to navigate to a folder quickly in the same way that you might file a message to a folder. This is also a big timesaver.

SpeedFiler is simple, well written, and saves me a few minutes a day as well as makes Filing emails fun.

Here is a quick example. I get an email that belongs in the “Reference” folders.

1. Type Control-Shift-V
2. Type Ref
3. Hit Enter

in step 2 you get this dialog.

Doesn’t get easier than that.

I have a few feature requests for SpeedFiler, namely that I can turn off the toolbars in Outlook (I just use the shortcut keys) and the other is that the Outlook boot scan get faster.

Oh, I also recommend subscribing to the author, Itzy Sabo’s blog, Email Overloaded.

For a very long time now I've been under the impression that there is just something wrong with the WiFi support in XP. Frequently my laptop and my wife's would just refuse to get an IP address from our router. I usually have to do a repair, reboot of the base station or reboot of the laptop. This happend with 3 different laptops that I've owned.

Needless to say this was just plain annoying.

Then a few weeks ago I installed this update to get WPA2 support since my Airport Express supports that new standard.

Lo and behold I have yet to experience any wireless problems. Rock solid.

I suspect there were some bug fixes in there. Since the update is optional though I bet you don't have it.

The other day I decided to take some pics of my cat and test my Black and White Photoshop Skills. The gallery is here.

For the past few months some of my former co-workers were working on a release of Entourage that integrates with Apple’s Spotlight and SyncServices.

Just to put things into perspective. Oh, about 3 years ago we tried to get support for iSync in, but there was no API and well, I guess SyncServices was the answer (but it didn’t appear till the last OS update).

Anyhoo, I have to say, the reason I’m writing this is because of what the folks at TidBits just published (yes I still read and subscribe to TidBits) an article with glowing praise for this update. It says such things as:

“One's overall impression, in short, is that the Microsoft folks have done this exactly right, and despite the extra hard disk space that the implementation requires, we're not at all sorry to have the contents of the Entourage database (which is in a proprietary and always at-risk format) reproduced in a form that any text processor can retrieve.”

 

“Overall, this seems on first meeting to be an extremely well conceived and implemented update. Entourage has suddenly become a far better Mac OS X citizen.”

 

“Nevertheless, it's no exaggeration to say that a great weight has been lifted from the minds of Entourage users. To the Microsoft team that brought us this update: bravo.”

 

[Microsoft Entourage Gets Spotlight and Sync]

 

Seriously, coming from TidBits, this is about the best you can do .

 

So congratulations to the Entourage Team!

Well, I guess I can’t say I’m surprised that my post got a lot of attention.

In the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of very nice emails from people from Apple, my readers, and people who found the post linked to by some one else.

You know you’ve bought a product that is good when you get emails from folks who work on it asking if they can help with any of the problems you’ve encountered, or just plain say “thanks and we’re hiring” .

The other day I was trying to explain to some one just what makes some gadgets more successful than others. What makes TiVo an amazing DVR but makes the Comcast and DirectTV DVRs suck? What makes the iPod rock, but makes every single other MP3 player mediocre? I think it boils down to Employees that care, Employees that eat their own dogfood (and are end users), Employees empowered to make changes, and selling the entire experience to the customer. I’d also add that you also need some special amount of pixie dust and laser like direction and focus from the top on the customer experience.

I’m a firm believer in “eating your own dogfood”. If you are on a product team and you are not dogfooding the next version of your product I emphatically feel that you do not deserve a place on your team. If you are not dogfooding other products that your company produces you should be ashamed. And if you are not using your competitors products, at least monthly, then you’re never going to win.

Principles for Success

The reason I think the iPod, TiVo, the Treo are best in class devices is because:

1. The employees that work on those products care a great deal about what they are building. It’s not just a job.
2. Other employees in the company also dogfood said product and care a great deal about the product and give plenty of feedback to the product team.
3. The product team is responsive and reacts to the feedback the receive.
4. The product team listens to what their customers say, and create a two way conversation with them.

Where Things Fail

The place where this breaks down is when:

1. You do not own the end to end experience (you make the software but not the hardware in the case where the hardware is > 50% of the experience).
2. Your customer is not the end user, but another company is your customer.

Some Examples

Reasons #1 and #2 are why:

1. XBOX 360 is better than the XBOX and every thing else currently out there.
2. The iPod will always be better than anything we produce the software for, but not the hardware (Portable Media Center is great, but the devices are no match in size and popularity)
3. The Palm Treo 650 is easier to use with one hand than the Treo 700
4. TiVo is better than Comcast or DirectTV’s DVR
5. my k-jam requires a reboot every day (as does my Cingular 2125).
6. The Windows PC is a flea market for pre-installed OEM software you don’t need that degrades your user experience.

Now there are exceptions when you don’t own the end to end experience. Media Center 2005 is great because greater than 50% of the experience is the interaction with the software… so the box I built in my living room is great because the software UX is great. I consider it better than TiVo but I’m also realistic that not everyone will build their own Media Center and that reason #6 from above can screw it all up.

I have yet to coin a phrase for this. But as a general concept, I believe any good technology products follow the basic principles above.