shahine.com/omar/

Well, I’ve had my Lifebook P7120 (review) for over a week now. I LOVE IT. This is the best PC laptop I’ve ever owned. When compared to the Sony TX Series it has the following advantages:

• it’s silent (it’s a bit eerie to have a silent laptop)
• it has a better keyboard (the feel, build, spring, spacing is better)
• has a better screen (no funny red hue)
• the array mic is nice, and the port layout is better
• the bottom is coated with a faux sued which keeps the heat transfer from the magnesium case from bothering you.

The build quality of the laptop is like a Thinkpad. This thing is solid, scratch proof, black, easy to type on, and has the best trackpad I’ve ever used on a laptop (as good as a PowerBook trackpad). It made me realize what a piece of junk the trackpad on Toshiba and Dells.

One nice touch on this laptop is that I can remove the DVD burner to save about .4 lbs which makes the travel weight 2.65 lbs, lighter than the Vaio TX Series. I can also add another battery in the DVD drive bay to increase battery life to approx 11 hours. Right now I’m getting about 5.5 hours with brightness set to 7/8.

Now, it’s not as “sexy” as the Vaio but that’s ok with me. The screen is not wafer thin, and it’s a bit smaller in width. But the overall thickness of the Lifebook is very close to the TX series anyway (with the rubber feet and all on a table they are almost identical even though the advertised thickness does not bode well for the Lifebook).

Some other pluses: I did not have to flatten the PC cause it wasn’t loaded up with Junkware. I did have one problem with their supposed power savings program. For some silly reason it will only run for a local administrator, not a domain account with local administrator privileges. I emailed Fujitsu about this but they are hopeless. In the mean time I found this great freeware battery monitor program. The Bluetooth module requires the crappy Toshiba bluetooth stack and will not work with the Microsoft stack (bummer). Another nice touch is that when the laptop successfully enters standby it beeps. I can’t tell you how useful that is because I've been burned many times by Windows preventing my laptop from going into standby causing my battery to get sucked dry. Speaking of standby, this little guy resumes from standby faster than any other laptop I’ve owned. It’s as fast as a PowerBook (and they are really fast). This must be some kind of hardware/driver thing.

I’m writing this on a plane right now, and love the fact that the laptop is really easy to use in coach even with the seat in front of me reclined.

Bottom line. This is an incredible laptop and IMHO outshines the Vaio TX Series in every way except for some subtle design aspects. It’s a fast machine and I have yet to experience any performance compromises compared to my Dell Latitude D610.

Shawn loves this post by Jeff Atwood, and so do I. In the software world you hear this a lot from folks. Most people just roll their eyes when the “.. and a Pony” requests/wishes come in.

I love this quote:

“It'd also be nice if trees were made of cotton candy, and rain was delicious lemonade.”

“This is what I refer to as ".. and a Pony!" thinking: the person asking the question doesn't know that what they're asking for is essentially impossible. So you might as well throw a Pony in there while you're at it. Everyone loves Ponies.”

[Jeff Atwood]

When I read great stuff like this from Scott Hanselman it makes me think that a bunch of us should get together and write some articles/chapters for a book on Systems of Organization.

We are each developing our own highly effective systems by hand picking what works best from a number of other sources like David Allen’s Getting Things Done. These span work, life, digital, analog, and a topic most folks don’t even think about; computer organization and digital clutter.

Why is it when Apple does something sleazy, no one calls them on it? If Microsoft did something like this there would be no end to the belly aching.

This is why I don’t care to ever install iTunes. It always installs some crap I don’t want (like QuickTime with it’s super crappy little tray icon and file helper resetting behavior). Not to mention all the extra processes that iTunes has running for no good reason (why do I need an iPodService running 24/7)?

Yeah Baby!!!!

A real server based contact updating service that works with your Messenger Buddy List or your Windows Live Mail Contacts.

2006 is starting off on the right foot for our services.

My favorite screen capture tool is Cropper. Version 1.7 fixes a bug I found where if you launched Cropper from SlickRun or AppRocket it would not work. Brian fixed it really quick, and even fixed another bug I didn’t report .

Cropper is handy cause you can measure/control the screen capture region before taking the screen shot and it has many flexible output formats (including AVI).

It’s a top notch app.

Most of the sexy stuff that you see about Windows Live/MSN is the UX and the functionality of the products. There is a ton of work that goes on behind the scenes, and much of that happens on the Passport team. As Trevin points out, it's not often that people get excited about Security Features, but when we do a good job it should be praised. In this case, Greg Hughes (who is a Security Guy) had this to say about some recent Passport work:

"But even better than that, as I typed the new password, a color-coded 'password strength' bar showed me the complexity strength of my password. It went from Red (weak) to Yellow (so-so) to Green (strong) as I typed. Nice! That's what we need more of - simple, powerful tools to help end users be more secure in real time. Great work, whoever decided to put that in, and to whoever built it. It's quite effective."

This kind of stuff is great for our consumers, as password management and security is super important. You really don't want your passport password comprimised, and this feature tells people in a very easy and friendly manner how "strong" their password is.

Trevin goes on to say:

"I've always been jealous of other products in the company that get lots of super cool press coverage (eg. Kahuna, start.com, etc).  My team always gets passed over because we're not shipping e2e customer scenarios, but rather the glue for other services to deliver their scenarios.  I'll going to go bask the warm glow of my 30 seconds of glory now... "

So Thanks Trevin and the Passport team for running a service that keeps ours afloat .

I will not miss you one bit. Good riddens.

BTW - Jensen Harris has one of the best blogs on the Internet. Back in the day I got to work a bit with Jensen when he was the Mac Outlook PM (the classic Exchange Client for the Mac OS before Entourage became the Exchange Client).

I am so impressed by his posts about Office 12. They are all must reads.

Nick, you ROCK. FeedDemon 2.0 is amazing. The UI is better and I can mark posts as read from the newspaper view.

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading Mao : The Unknown Story. I was interested last time I went to Shanghai, and decided I’d get smart about the founder of the world’s largest communist party. The book claims that Mao was responsible for over 70 million Chinese Deaths. The Communist Party seems to still believe in the good of Mao, and unlike Stalin’s death in the case of the Russian Communist Party, did little to disavow themselves of him when he died. I believe that sentiment is slowly changing and I remember the NPR story on this book where they referred to how people now say that he was 70% good which is a big change.

The book was fascinating. If you have any interest in China I’d recommend it. It’s a bit thick and detailed so I found myself board at times. Mostly because hearing about the things that he did over and over got tiring.

I think I’d like to read about Stalin next.

One thing that I found interesting was that this is now the third book I’ve read that paints a pretty grim picture for Henry Kissenger. I don’t know much about that guy, but he seems to have gotten his finger in a lot of things.

A lot of folks have asked me if I plan on getting the Treo 700w since I loved my Treo 650 so (before I kicked it to the curb due to the stability issues with Versa Mail).

The short answer is no. Here is why:

1. I don’t do CDMA. Not now, not ever. I value that I can take my phone to Egypt, Paris and Shanghai, turn it on and send/receive SMS using my US phone number. Of course I can also send/receive calls.
2. If you read Michael Gartenberg’s post comparing what I have now (the k-jam which is basically the same as the PPC-6700) to the Treo 700w I don’t gain much by getting one even when there is a GSM version.

I don’t understand the 240 x 240 thing. My Treo 650 was 320 x 320 and my k-jam is 320 x 240 which is still not enough. Also, the 700w doesn’t come with the Push Email support in Exchange 2003 SP2. No sense in getting a  new device till that stuff is burned on the ROM.

However, am I excited that Palm is developing on our platform? Heck Yeah! It means that they will continue to push us to make WM5 more usable with a single hand. The folks who tried to converge Smartphone and Pocket PC into a single platform left out a hella lot of dialogs and crap that don’t support softkeys making me use my stylus. Compare to Palm OS 5 where I NEVER had to use a stylus for anything. Plus I am sure they will get us to make the OS more usable in general. Those guys “get it” where HTC never will (not in the DNA). 

As one of the PMs on our team often says “Save your drama for your mamma”. If I could say that to Motorola I would. Looks like there is just as much drama around the Q as there was the MPX.

Every time I go to Redmond, the issues around space are apparent. It seems we hired a few thousand people in the last few years and no one told the facilities people. Same is true down here on our SVC campus where space is getting scarce. However, since there are many groups on our campus, and not a single VP that sits over every group, there is quite a bit if inequality between teams (some teams have people doubled up in offices while others are not). Now one problem that we do not have in SVC is parking. There are plenty of spots to go around, unlike in Redmond where you can easily spend 45 minutes looking for a spot (and the spots up there are all tiny. basically a standard Redmond parking spot is a compact spot in California. I’m alway amused to see a Ford F-150 or larger crammed into one of those things).

Anyhow, not sure how I missed this but it appears that we purchased the Safeco campus in Redmond for $209.5 million. This is pretty good news, but definitely not cheap. I often drive by those buildings on the way from Main Campus to RedWest. They look like very nice buildings with lots of glass and a very Pacific Northwest kind of look to them. I can just imagine that a ton of groups are wondering if they will get to move in there.

Then again, Microsoft doesn’t own much  of anything except buildings, desks, and computers.

I happen to love Wine. A few weeks ago I was lucky to finally have Chateau Margaux Margaux. If you know anything about wine then you know what I am talking about. I believe it was a 1984 or so (can’t remember) bottle and it was like nothing I’d ever had.

This is one of the five First Growth wines of Bordeaux. So it’s special like that.

I liked it so much, I’m thinking of buying at least a bottle a year and hiding it so that in 20 or so years I can enjoy them like I did this bottle.

Dare does a pretty good job explaining “The Microsoft Way”. When I started my career at Microsoft, I worked on the Macintosh Platform (as most of you know). This was about as different as it gets at Microsoft. You aren’t developing products for the “platform”, or the “ecosystem”. You lived a dual life with a Windows and Macintosh on your desk, or your lap. You have quite a bit of freedom to do things for the Mac end user, and you have almost zero “Microsoft Tax”. You do have the “Office Tax” like supporting new file formats, PowerPoint animation compatibility and so on. But you also get to do new features that may or may not ever appear in the Windows versions. The Entourage team is growing quite familiar with the newest tax, the Exchange Tax.

When you leave that little world, and you witness what it’s like supporting the ecosystem or the platform you start to feel the impact of all the Taxes. Now that’s not to say that taxes are bad; the fact that I have a highway to drive to work on, or a train to ride, or a school to send my kids, or police, fireman etc are because of taxes. You just need to understand that you HAVE to spend time on these things, and that as our company gets bigger and has more customers those taxes increase. It’s the job of the managers, leads etc in the company to make sure that you carefully pick where those tax dollars go, and that your investments are balanced (like a portfolio).

I have 60 invites to give away for Windows Live Mail. Send me an email @ shahineo AT hotmail.com with your hotmail account that you want to use in the beta and I'll hook you up.

Update: please read this post before sending me mail for an invite.

Like Andy & Trevin, I feel that bluetooth on Windows is a complete and utter disaster, or as Trevin says "Bluetooth is the devil". I feel sorry for our users.

When you buy a PC with “bluetooth support” one of two things will happen:

1. You will get the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack
2. You will get the WIDCOMM/Toshiba Bluetooth Stack

If you get #1 you are sort of lucky. It stays out of your way, and does not have a million running processes, desktop icons and other garbage. However, you will not be able to pair it with a Bluetooth Headset for use with Skype or Office Communicator. You will be able to use a bluetooth mouse, dial-up connection and other stuff. Because the Microsoft bluetooth stack lacks some “core” features, a bunch of our OEMs have decided that they can do a better job writing software than we can (and they have failed). Hardware companies should NOT be allowed to make software. Companies that are in commodity businesses should not be allowed either. They just DON’T CARE about usability and they DON’T RESPECT YOUR PC.

If you get #2 you PC will be infected by unsigned drivers (with software to fake click them anyway), shortcuts everywhere (that you cannot remove), 40 (yes 40) prefab COM ports for your use, 3 always running processes for Bluetooth AV support, Hands Free, LAN profiles, tray icons, and something else. The UI for pairing is utterly confusing, and the options dialog has incomprehensible settings with 3 rows of tabs. You will be able to pair it with a bluetooth headset but will find it impossible to use with ActiveSync, a mouse, or exchange files over bluetooth. However, you’ll be able to exchange business cards (yipee, who needs that) and a million other things in an attempt to support every single bluetooth profile on the planet.

Why is it that software vendors feel the need to put crap all over the machine in an effort to remind you who they are and that they are valuable. Why don’t they spend their R&D getting their drivers signed and WHQL certified rather than instructing you on how to click “Install Anyway”. Anti Virus Software is like this, placing shortcuts, explorer shell add-ins, outlook toolbar etc all over the place…

It’s times like these where I long for the days of using a Mac where Apple has NAILED the bluetooth experience (like 2 years ago).

What can I say, I’m an Alt-Tab guy. Tried all those Expose like utilities for Windows (TopDesk is the best) but I never end up using them for more than 7 days.

However, TaskSwitchXP Pro is simply the best Alt-Tab replacement for Windows (and it’s free).

I don't like Rain that much. Sure, every once in a while is cute. I like sun, and lots of it. I'm Egyptian after all so this sort of makes sense.

Anyway, every 1-2 years I ponder if I should move to Redmond. Sure real estate prices in the bay area suck, but I don't really care cause I own my own place (and consider myself lucky that I bought at the downturn of the dot.com bust). The bay area is a fantastic place to live in this country (which explains why it's so dammed expensive). Napa Valley, Sonoma and the Coast are an hour away, Tahoe and great skiing are a few more. It rains for about 1 month a year, and the rest of the times its sunny and nice.

The summers in Seattle are pretty dammed amazing, but the traffic sucks and people drive to slowly. A career at Microsoft NOT in Redmond limits your career growth a bit... but if you can live with that you can find creative ways to keep learning new things; one of the many reasons I made the move from MacBU to Hotmail and from an Individual Contributor to a Manager

So when I read stuff like this, I look at my wife and I say "We're not moving".

Ed calls it Junkware. I call it crapware. Either way it's evil and does much harm. I doubt we'll see a solution to this soon. When Vista ships with DVD burning support, there will still be crappy software that the OEMs place on the machine that was not usability tested, looks awefull and probably crashes you machine. Same is true for spyware, and every other form utility possible.

So, on Monday after a very frustrating experience ordering my Vaio from Sony, my VGN-TX630P arrived. After using it for a few days, I believe that I will ultimatley return it.

I LOVE this laptop for many reasons. It's sexy, small (and I mean small), light, has the thinnest LCD I have ever seen. I HATE this laptop for the reasons I hate all Sony laptops. They took over 6 GB of my 60GB hard drive for the "recovery partition" I understand if this machine had no CD drive, but it has one, and the cost to burn a DVD with the OS and restore software can't be more than a buck. The kind of company that skimps on a buck is questionable. And of course, the minute I booted the laptop I knew I had to flatten it cause it was rat infested with OEM crapware.

So, off to create restore disks I go. Sony included software to burn the recovery partition to 7 CDs. That took an hour. Then I installed Windows, and proceeded to install about 15 "utilities" and "drivers" to get the laptop to function. Some of the utilities didn't install properly and I could not get the power management sofware to install. To give sony credit, they make the process of downloading the bits easy compared to other guys. But installing is a nightmare of orchestrated instructions that resulted in failure (and I'm not a dumb guy).

Anyhoo, after about 6 hours I was done. Then the fun began. I got everything working the way I wanted. I marveled at how empowered and unshackled I feel. I can take this laptop anywhere! It's thin, and feels like I am carrying around a notebook. It's even fast and doing my daily computing tasks is no problem at all. It resumes from standby in a jiffy and I just LOVE to use it. The keyboard took a bit of getting used to and I have to admit I don't like the painted keys. It feels flat. With 17mm keys and 1.7 mm of travel it feels cramped. I don't see the benefit of the EDGE support since it's expensive (49.99 a month with a 2 year contract) and slow (100 KBps vs EVDO which is upwards of 500 KBps) so I won't use that. It has a nifty feature that lets you watch DVDs w/o booting Windows. The battery life really is close to 7 hours and the carbon fiber case is stiff and scratch resistent.

Every laptop should be like this. I will never buy another > 4 lb laptop again. I can use this thing with one hand and balance it on a knee. HOWEVER, I found out this laptop's dirty little secret. It's NOISY.

The Vaio starts out very quiet. But after 10 or so minutes the CPU fan it humming a long. I figure it's about 26 bB loud at idle and 40 dB lout when it's actually doing something. I an VERY sensitive to fan noise and I can't have a laptop that's louder than my desktop machine. Normally the sound is not a problem at work, but at home it drives my crazy. Also, there is this weird red hue on the screen when looking at white backgrounds (I assume something related to the LED backlighting technology).

The bad news is that apparently there is a revision to the Vaio TX series called the TX2 due out later this year that does not have a fan at all. Oh well. I can't wait, I can't go back to my big huge dell.

So I am going to follow the advice of all my friends, and order the Fujitsu P7120. It's a very comporable laptop with similar size, weight, specs, and battery life except it HAS NO FAN AT ALL. It's also got an array mic, and the folks at Fujitsu are very nice to me. I also get a DVD burner (which cost an extra $300 on the Vaio). Finally, the keyboard on the Fujitsu is a bit more roomy than the Sony and has normal keys (not flat painted ones).

I ordered the Fujitsu today; it ships monday and the will overnight it for $30 or ship via ground for free. Sony on the other hand will ship the unit 2-3 business days after you order it, will charge you $70 for ground and $140 for overnight. Also Fujitsu will not crap all over my hard drive and they include a recovery disk on DVD.

I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to keep the Sony another week till I evaluate the Fujitsu, but will in all likleyhood send it back to Sony for a refund. And all those folks that gave me crap about supporting the Rootkit company rest easy .

But I am going to miss the extra resulution on my Vaio. 1366 x 768 is a great display resolution for this small laptop. Those extra pixels matter .

In the end it will probably be a wash. I give a few things up, gain a few things I didn't have and I won't have to listen to a cpu fan every day.

I'm actually working on writing a post about building to scale. Phil Smoot, the Product Unit Manager for the Hotmail Backend team (they build the systems that store and deliver email), was recently interviewed in an article titled Behind the Scenes at Hotmail and it's now on Slashdot. The comments are quite good and civil .

Dare has a few good posts on scaling that I plan on referencing if I ever get around to my post.

"The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture."

...

"Building online services requires more than the ability to sling code and hack databases. Lots of stuff gets written about the more trivial aspects of building an online service (e.g. switch to sexy, new platforms like Ruby on Rails) but the real hard work is often unheralded and rarely discussed"

Dare speaks the truth. Walter Hsueh, one of our lead developers on Windows Live mail outlines some of our recent experiences with AJAX and the .NET Framework 2.0.

It used to be that I could just flatten a PC w/o thinking about what was there before I flattened it. Since I have both a C and D partition, I keep any data on my D partition (I move all my doc folders etc using the Tweak XP Powertoy). However, there are a few things you want to do before booting Windows and paving:

1. If you use any downloadable pay for music services, make sure to de-authorize the computer. This will save you at least 10–20 min later asking tech support for that service to manually de-authorize for you. I was constantly hitting my 5 machine limit with MSN Music because of this.
2. If you use any applications that create a persistent cache then back up that data. You will typically find all this stuff in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data although for some applications this will be located in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data
   1. FeedDemon comes to mind here. Since I use the NewsBin as well as flag posts a lot, I would like my new Windows install to have this data. I have lost numerous flagged posts because I forgot to backup the FeedDemon cache folder.
   2. Your Adobe Bridge Cache (this can save you a long time later)
   3. Your Microsoft Digital Media Suite 2006 Cache (ditto here)
3. Use the Save My Settings wizard in Office 2003 to easily carry over all your prefs from Office 2003 to the new machine. This comes in handy all the time.
1. Optionally manually migrate your Outlook Autocomplete history file to the new machine. Nothing sucks worse then having to look people up in the GAL if you can't spell their name.

update: added link to manually migrate the outlook autocomplete history.

Dennis has a bad experience with a Netgear router.

IMHO, avoid pretty much everyone. I’ve used Netgear, D-link, Linksys. None of them work reliably. So what do I use now? Apple. That’s right, cause I know that smart people down the street from my office designed that stuff and it works. But you pay a premium for it. I’m happy to do so when it comes to my home network. My first wireless base station was an Airport, and I’m back to using them exclusively after numerous failed attempts with everyone in between.

Dennis, you should know better. Get an AirPort Express if you want something small that will travel.

The Toshiba Gigabeat S will be my next portable media player. I beta tested Portable Media Center v2 and absolutely loved it (just like I loved v1). But the v1 hardware was huge, now with v2 they support much smaller hardware and the QVGA display I had on my test device was amazing.

This is going to be a killer device. PMC UX is far far better than the iPod. CNet may have given the Creative Zen Vision:M best of show for CES, but I don’t buy for a second that Creative has learned how to create a UX that’s any better than the Micro (which was just tolerable), or stopped pushing it’s bad media player software on you.

I’m so very happy that I won’t have to get a mac to get an app like Aperture. Lightroom looks great, and I can’t wait for the Windows beta.

Fortune just rated Microsoft one of the best 100 companies to work for.

According to Forbes, Microsoft is the 42nd best company to work for, the 11th best for a large company.

Microsoft is also one of 14 companies that pays 100% Healthcare.

“The software king offers what may be the most generous health-insurance plan in America. The premium is zero, with no deductible. And it's the first U.S. corporation to pay for therapy for dependents who are autistic. “

I never thought I'd see this day!!! So long Comcast and big silly cable co. I will be able to tune DirecTV directly in Windows Media Center. Unbelievable. It will also work with XBOX 360.

Will have to live with crappy Comcast DVR for a bit longer, but this is excellent news.

My Comcast DVR is such a bad product I don’t even know where to begin. The day I can buy this, I will drive this DVR box down to the comcast office and drop kick it back to them.

I really can’t wait. Latley my DVR has decided that it will only randomly play some of my recordings, cutting some off at 40 min, or 1 min, or just plane stutter for some of the others.

Vista + this ATI Gizmo will be heaven.

I broke down and got the Sony Vaio TX. I should have it in about a week. I got the VGN-TX630P/B but before doing so I looked long and hard at the Fujitsu P7120 which is a revision to the P7000 and has many more changes than you might expect. It was a tough call, and here are some of the facts:

• Both laptops have LED backlight displays, the first of their kind. This means they use much less power, can have thinner cases, and are brighter.
• The Sony’s Screen is 11.1 inch 1366 x 768 while the Fujitsu’s is 10.6 inch 1280 x 768.
• I believe the Sony’s keyboard is a tad larger (90% of a full size keyboard).
• Both laptops employ the same 1.2 GHZ Intel ULV processor and use DDR2 memory
• Both laptops have 1.8 inch 4200 rpm 60GB drives
• The Sony has EDGE support (at > $40 a month I doubt I will ever use it, pluse EDGE is slow compared to EVDO).
• The Sony claims 7h standard battery life, the Fujitsu needs the extended battery to get close to this.
• The Sony is thinner and lighter (2.7 lbs vs 3.2 lbs)
• The Fujitsu will obviously have less crapware installed by default, with is the big bummer about the Sony. I know I will need to flatten it first thing.
• The Fujitsu has NO FAN, and is completley passivley cooled.
• The Fujitsu has a modular drive bay allowing for another battery.
• The Fujitsu has an array microphone

Both were about the same price, but in the end the Sony edged out the Fujitsu due to the larger screen, higher resolution and better battery life and EDGE support that I may use. However I was VERY tempted by the fact that the Fujitsu has no Fan, making it totally silent… tempting.

Anyway, I’m looking forward for my new gadget.

Since 1999 I’ve done my taxes using TurboTax. I tried TaxCut one year (back in 2000 or so) and compared the results from both programs. TaxCut never asked me what I owed on my previous year’s state tax return, and as such never deducted it from my federal income. When I inquired about this via TaxCut tech support they informed that their software did not in fact support this “feature”. Holey smokes, I returned it for a refund in a jiffee.

Well 6 versions of TurboTax later I wonder if I am missing something. Well today in the mail I got a free shrinkwrapped copy of TaxCut. I guess I will try again this year and see if the software is any better. Clever folks, this is a good way to get me to try it.

Last year, I really appreciated the ability of TurboTax to automatically download my W2 from Microsoft. Saved my time and the possibility of making mistakes. I hope TaxCut can do this as well.

Sometimes I am awestruck by our software. Why here I am sitting at my computer. I just updated someone’s contact info using Outlook. I’m connected via RPC/HTTP which means I don’t have to RAS into work. 15 minutes from now, my cell phone will sync to exchange and automatically get this updated information. I don’t have to do jack. I could just have easily done this from an internet cafe by logging into Outlook Web Access. I never ever think about my phone being updated, or my Outlook Address Book being updated (or task list and calendar for that matter). True piece of mind, which is almost zen like.

This kind of stuff is no easy feat. Took a few release of some heavy hitting software… sometimes we just take this stuff for granted. I wish everyone that had a cell phone could have this experience. I hope we bring this functionality to consumers soon.

I often joke with people that the reason I’ll never leave Microsoft is that I can’t live without these kind of features. Can’t live without having an IT department that lets me pretty much do whatever I want to my PC. Or a release share that has every single product we’ve ever made, and others that have versions that won’t be out for years… an opportunity to help shape products I don’t even work on.

Microsoft is heaven for a geek.