Trevin Chow: microsoft

Donate to charities by using Messenger

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:01:16 GMT

Microsoft and the Windows Live Messenger team are doing something very cool to help us all donate money to charity in a very easy, low impact way.

Donate money to charities by simply using Windows Live Messenger!

All you have to do is add a special emoticon tag to your “display name” in Messenger and from then on, Microsoft will donate a portion of the ad revenue generated by your usage of Windows Live Messenger.

You can choose from only from 9 different charities, but the charities they chose cover such a broad spectrum that I’d be surprised if everyone couldn’t find at least one that stands out to them.

What do you need to do?

Download and install
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Download Vista and Office 2007 now!

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:22:28 GMT

After slagging away countless months, weeks, days and hours, our team has finally shipped our latest, and definitely most important release to date. Woohoo!

Prior to joining Microsoft on the Windows Live ID team (known as .NET Passport back then), I was part of a startup and a few “side” projects. When I decided to ultimately move from Vancouver to Seattle and accept the Microsoft offer, a part of me was sad that I was leaving the “start up” environment behind me. There is something I find exciting about those moments right before you “hit the button” and your service hits the web for millions of people to see.

In Windows Live ID, I was the Lead PM on the team responsible for a whack of things includi

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Link for free T-Mobile Hotspot accounts

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 05:39:12 GMT

Looks like the T-Mobile and Windows Vista promotion is alive and kicking. I just stumbled upon this link which takes you straight to the sign-up page after which you can enjoy 3 free months of T-Mobile HotSpot lovin.

Link for free T-Mobile HotSpot accounts

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:39:49 GMT

Looks like the

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Vista upgrade on my Sony Vaio SZ381

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:17:24 GMT

I’ve been holding off as long as possible to upgrade to Windows Vista on my work laptop (Sony SZ381p) as the driver support uncertain up until RTM.

Unfortunately Sony has been dragging their butts and still don’t have any drivers published, even internally at work. Despite this, I finally decided to take a dive off the deep end and go for it.

I first used Windows Easy Transfer to backup all my files and settings just in case something went wrong. I’ve gone through so many nightmare scenarios previously with XP upgrades that I couldn’t afford any downtime since this is my primary work machine. I chose the default options in the Easy Transfer application and it identified 75GB worth of files to backup. Luckily I just got a new 120GB Western Digital external HD the other day.. made backup a snap. (Btw, this drive is highly recommended as I love how it draws power from the USB port instead of having a separate power supply. Makes it completely portable).

I plopped in the Vista CD and installed the
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Bill Gates CES 2007 Keynote

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:02:35 GMT

Here I am, in Vegas all ready for CES and I get sick. Talk about bad timing :( It’s worse this morning, but nothing I can’t slug through, at least for today.

Yesterday was Bill Gates’ keynote for CES. We weren’t able to watch it live because we ended up getting wicked tickets for Le Reve at the Wynn Hotel (highly recommended btw). I watched the keynote on screencast afterwards and here’s a summary of the things I thought were hot. Do some web searches to get a verbatim summary of the rest of the keynote if you’re interested.

Windows Home Server: My buddy Lee is PM on this project and his team has been slugging away at this project for a little while now. It’s great to see the fruits of their labour get announced, and at CES no less! Basically it’s a product and software to allow home user
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CES Redux Redux

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 02:19:16 GMT

I’m off to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the 3rd year in a row. I LOVE THIS CONFERENCE. It’s a gadget geek’s dream. I’ll be pimpin’ Windows Marketplace in the Communications section of Booth 7144 in the Central Hall. At our booth, you’ll be able to find out why Win

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Can't hibernate your computer with 1GB+ of RAM in XP?

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:33:18 GMT

I previously struggled with an issue where I was unable to hibernate when my laptop had 1GB or more of RAM in it. Putting my machine into standby worked probably 50% of the time. When hibernate or standby failed, I would get this crazy “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete this API” from a system tray message. Pretty self-explanatory eh?

At that time, I contacted our internal help desk here at Microsoft to find out what was going on. I was told that we were aware of this specific issue and it was being fixed for Vista but no solution was available for XP. So I ended up bringing my RAM down to 512MB and that solved the issue. Being able to hibernate and standby was crucial for my sanity here at work since I do this probably a hundred times a day, including when I go home for the day. It was crazy to shut down XP altogether, lose all the c

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What is the Digital Locker?

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:44:00 GMT

I’ve been pimping the Windows Marketplace site the past few weeks on my blog… yes, I’m biased since I work on this team. However, we really do have some cool stuff going on

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Gimme some Xbox 360, Live and HDTV lovin'!

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:44:32 GMT

Today Engadget reports that Microsoft will be announcing the Xbox Live Video service:

"Microsoft is announcing something fairly momentus, not for the gaming community, but for the CE industry. The Xbox 360, along with Akimbo, will be among the first mass-market devices able to download high def television programs -- and the first we know of in the states able to download HD movies. The service is called Xbox Live Video, and the fall update enables customers to spend their Microsoft points on standard and HD television from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Turner, and UFC, as well as HD movies from Warner Bros., Paramount, and so on"

Previous announcements from our competitors in the video download space:

It's freakin' cool that we're taking a swipe at Apple, Netflix and TiVo in one fell swoop. This really is a industry changing move. The Xbox team continues to pleasantly surprise me over and over again. I'm really, really hoping that there will be an external drive available that is larger than the existing 20GB since an average HD movie will be ~5GB. Com'on Xbox team, I know you can do it.... please?

This announcement, combined with my Amazon pre-order of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and Gears of War will really have me glued to my TV for the near future :)

(FYI -- if you pre-order the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player, it will include an HD-DVD version of King Kong and the DVD Remote control for free!)

Welcome Virtual Earth 3D!

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 07:39:37 GMT

Today the Virtual Earth team announced the availability of Virtual Earth 3D in the press release titled Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search. In particular:

"When people visit Live Search (http://live.com), type a query into the search box and click the “Maps” tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird’s-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy."
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"Three-dimensional models are available initially for 15 U.S. cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth. Terrain imagery in 3-D is available globally, and Microsoft expects to offer 3-D imagery in an ever expanding set of cities. Other features provided by Live Search include access to real-time traffic information in select major U.S. cities, and access to business listings “yellow pages” and people listings “white pages” that allows consumers to easily find local information and act on it. "

You'll first need to install the Virtual Earth 3D imaging component, which seems to be a combination of a browser-helper object and Active-X control. Once you install this component, you'll be able to see the slick Virtual Earth 3D like in this query which results in this: (I cropped the screenshot to the most interesting piece):

Admittedly the performance isn't the snappiest, but I had it set at the "best" quality setting. I give the VE team kudos for simply shipping this in production to the real world. A lesser team would have held back playing the death waiting game for performance to be "perfect". As Borat says, Sexy time!

Two IE7 useful shortcuts

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:44:41 GMT

I'm a keyboard fiend, so when I find new keyboard shortcuts I get excited. IE7 has a 2 useful shortcuts that are worth sharing:

CTRL + E -- give focus to the search bar.

Middle-click on the mouse -- open up link in new background tab

I find both of these incredibly useful. The middle-mouse click is cool because it saves you the usual Right-click and left-click on "Open in New Tab".

An alternative to CTRL+E shortcut above is to just give focus to the address bar with the old trusty ALT+D keyboard shortcut and just type your search query and hit <enter>. One gotcha with this latter method is that if your search term is only a single word, IE will assume you are trying to go to an intranet URL and prepend "http://" to it.

Internet Explore 7 released!

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 07:14:24 GMT

Internet Explorer 7 was just released for Windows XP! Go get it!

For add-ons, check out the IE7 add-on site. Essential add-ons for me:

Bloglines browser add-on - allows one-click bloglines suscription of an RSS feed
Fiddler - acts as a local proxy to allow inspection of HTTP traffic
Developer toolbar - while not as good as the dev toolbars for Firefox, it still gets the job done

Vista RC2 installed at home

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:19:52 GMT

I previously tried installing Vista RC1 on my work laptop, a Sony VGN-SZ240P, and everything went well except that I realized at the end of the installation that Sony doesn't have any Vista compatible drivers. This means that all of my hotkeys (monitor swap, brightness, volume, etc) weren't going to work! I had to revert back to XP that same day.

Fast forward a few weeks and I got around to installing Windows Vista RC2 on my home pc. This is a big jump because I'm never a fan of beta OS's on my home machines. I decided to take the plunge and was pleasantly surprised that after install I only had 2 issues I immediately identified:

1. My Nvidia 6600 video card drivers weren't sketchy as heck and kept crashing. I got some beta drivers and everything is running smoothly.

2. My CD/DVD authoring software, Nero, wasn't compatible with Vista and my only solution was to uninstall.

After a week of using Vista at home I'm still impressed. Very stable, surprisingly quick and some neat features. I particularly like the built-in photo editing tools including the Windows Gallery. Love the built-in tagging features and ratings!

Turns out that 2 more issues cropped up that I don't have a fix for yet:

1. I keep getting an error about "COM Surrogate" failing and some cryptic error dialog. No idea why it happens as it's not induced by any particular app I'm running. I just happens while I'm even using Windows explorer.

2. I have a Phatnoise phatbox in my car which uses a hard-drive cartridge for MP3 storage. This is one cool device because it has voice prompts for all menus and even can announce playlist names and song information. You load songs onto it via a cradle connected via USB and desktop software. Their desktop software seemed to work fine, but when it goes to generate the voice prompts for songs, it gives a cryptic error message about not being able to "write to the stream". The playlists then get corrupted on my cartridge rendering that particular playlist useless. So right now I"m stuck with the music I have on my cartridge.. I emailed Phatnoise support and really hope they can find a solution for me, but I'm doubtful.

If anyone has any idea about fixing my 2 latest problems, drop me a line.

Balmer interview with Business Week

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:56:39 GMT

Business Week has an interesting interview with Steve Balmer where he comments on the recent YouTube acquisition by Google, Bill Gates' upcoming departure from Microsoft and even the pricing on the Xbox360 vs. PS3. Thanks to Brian for the pointer.

Dare meets Bill Gates

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:27:23 GMT

Dare is a fellow Windows Live guy working on our Contacts platform and coincidentally we also were interns at the same time back in 2001 when I was a senior in college. Dare recently had a one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates and his blog post about it is quite interesting. Check it out!

Windows Live Spaces launches!

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:40:59 GMT

The Spaces team just finished unveiling their major release under the Windows Live brand -- Windows Live Spaces lives!

Kudos and congrats to the entire Spaces team, especially those I have worked closely with during their Windows Live ID adoption -- Jeff, Jay, Greg, Mike, Amy.

Since Spaces is under now officially under the Windows Live umbrella (and thus, the live.com domain) they are fully integrated into the Windows Live ID sign-in experience. That's right, the multi-user feature that everyone and their mother has been asking for to be enabled for Spaces is finally released! Just like how you fell in love when Windows Live ID launched back in April with the new sign-in experience on www.live.com to start with, it's now getting rolled out to more and more sites as we bust the lid open on new services.

For some reason though, the new rollout seems to be having problems with the style sheet or something, because a ton of styles aren't being loaded and the page formatting is a bit funky. Nothing like the launch of a brand new service to overload a few servers :)

Since all spaces are now moved to live.com, I guess it's only right that I ask everyone to update their bookmarks to my space and RSS feed :)

Space: http://trevin.spaces.live.com

RSS feed: http://trevin.spaces.live.com/feed.rss

Not to mention our Windows Live ID team blog: http://winliveid.spaces.live.com.

Once again, congrats to the Spaces team on this HUGE release.

Bill Gates to leave Microsoft in 2008

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 21:09:06 GMT

Woah.

Gadgets support on Spaces!

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 04:48:35 GMT

Sweet! Spaces now supports gadgets! Doesn't that stock quote module I have at the top of my space look oddly familiar to the Stock gadget on live.com? :)

Great work live.com and Spaces team!

Microsoft stock taking a beating!

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:38:10 GMT

I've been watching in horror as the Microsoft stock has been plumeting in recent weeks, and being at TechEd I've been a little disconnected from things and didn't realize how far it fell. Dare and Sanaz both pointed out that fell to mid-$21. Ouch! I wish there really was a direct relationship with our stock price and the heart and soul we all put into our products. If there was this 1:1 relationship between these 2 things, our stock would be the only stock in people's portfoliios.

$21.46 just isn't fair :(

The bright side is that at least we're up 36 cents as of 1 min ago!

TechEd update

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 02:35:51 GMT

Sunday night was the Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia keynote speech, where they talked about "people ready" organizations and the fundamental shift to services for B2B and B2C scenarios. Ray's speech was great as always -- very charismatic, engaging and concise. Loved it.

Today was our first day manning the Windows Live booth in the Expo hall. I had scheduled a bunch of my Windows Live ID team members to rotate booth duty, but I ended up doing it solo for the entire day to give them the opportunity to go to TechEd sessions.

Booth traffic was pretty light today, and the most frequent question was "What is Windows Live?". People's guesses at what Windows Live was were all over the map -- some thought it was related to Live Communicator, others thought it was just the www.live.com homepage, while others took wild stabs in the dark. Gerard commented that one person thought it might be related to our Education/Learning divison!

After talking to about 25 customers in the first 30 mins, it was abundantly clear that customers have no idea at all what Windows Live is, or how it relates to Windows or MSN. This explained why there was so little traffic to our booth -- of the people that stopped by, they almost did it by accident. Those that did see us on the TechEd floorplan, probably avoidede our booth because they thought they knew what products/services we represented (and were most likely wrong).

Frankly, we have no one to blame but ourselves for this mess. Clearly our external communication failed somewhere. I'm confident we can recover though, it will just take much longer than anyone ever expected. And quite honestly, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if consumers don't "get" what Windows Live is, as long as they like, and use, the services and products we ship.

I'm looking forward to how the week progresses to get more traffic in the booth and see how the momentum builds. I have 2 talks scheduled for this week that I'm looking forward to -- the first is on Wednesday which is a partner briefing where selected partners have been invited to listen to a panel of Windows Live speakers. The second session is a session I share with Danny Thorpe, where we're going over the Windows Live end-to-end platform and primer to Windows Live ID and plans to open the ID platform.

Timing wise, our presentation couldn't get any later in the TechEd -- it's on friday on one of the last speaker slots (1 to 2:30pm). Come on by the Web TLC Theater 2 and cheer me on :)

Update: One thing I forgot to point out is that the TechEd crowd is primarily sys admins and IT/hardware focused. They are not the same crowd that is at conferences like ETech, Mix or even PDC. This will contribute to a lot of the disconnect and confusion, because much of Windows Live is about B2C, vs. strictly B2B or "behind the firewall" where most of the attendees spend their cycles.

TechEd 2006 here I come

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:27:58 GMT

I'm off to TechEd 2006 in Boston tonight and will be there all next week.

I'll be periodically manning a demo station with other Windows Live peeps, and in particular showing off Windows Live ID as well as talking with Danny Thorpe in "Technical Learn Center (TLC) Theater" session titled Windows Live Platform End-to-End: How to Build Your Own “Party Start” Gadget-Based App (WEBTLC23) . In particular, I'll be giving an overview on Windows Live ID platform and how we're opening it up for rich clients later this fall with a client SDK.

The session is on Friday, June 16th from 1:00 to 2:15pm in the Technical Learning Center Blue, in the Web Theatre (on the Expo level).

If you're attending TechEd and want meet up to discuss Windows Live ID and identity, shoot me an email at trevin.chow(at)microsoft.REMOVETHIS.com

WMP 11 Beta and MTV Urge

Fri, 19 May 2006 22:05:29 GMT

Just noticed that a public beta of Windows Media Player 11 and the MTV Urge music service is now available on download.com. Urge was the music service announced at CES in a joint keynote with Bill Gates, MTV and Justin Timberlake (ugh). I haven't tried this yet, but will when I return from NYC.

"MTV Urge offers all the music you've ever heard of and lots you haven't. Urge gives you complete access to over 18 genres, countless styles, and everything in between--from rock, country, and hip-hop to classical, jazz, and the blues. With Urge you can enjoy exclusive music and video from your favorite MTV artists and shows, download or play music from every genre, get hundreds of radio stations and playlists, and keep your favorite new music coming with Urge Feeds."

Get on the Live Messenger beta

Fri, 05 May 2006 03:19:56 GMT

If you aren't already on the Live Messenger beta, what are you waiting for? Get on it and you can get cool features like the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant to get multi-user support on the new Windows Live sign-in.

The Live Messenger Beta used to be "invite only", but you can automatically get accepted into the beta program by going to this link:

http://ideas.live.com/signup.aspx?versionId=0eccd94b-eb48-497c-8e60-c6313f7ebb73

then sign in with the Windows Live ID that you use for Messenger. You then go use this link to download the latest Messenger beta (build 8.0.689):

http://g.msn.com/1csbeta/Mess80_EN

Your Xbox 360 can blog by itself

Thu, 04 May 2006 20:26:24 GMT

Looks like your Xbox360 can blog all by itself -- yes, by itself. Pretty cool and creep at the same time :) I've barely played my Xbox in the last 4-5 weeks due to it being crunch time at work, but apparantly you don't even have to play games for your Xbox to create blog entries.

Here's my feed: http://www.360voice.com/rss.asp?tag=Your%20Mommy

From Major Nelson's blog:

It's creepy and curious...all at the same time. XboxVoice.com give your Xbox 360 the ability to blog all by itself. In other words, you enter your gamertag at the site, and based on what you do on Xbox Live (games played etc) Xbox360voice will automatically create a blog for your Xbox 360. Each day your Xbox 360 will blog an entry…even if you don’t game. I told you, it’s kinda scary huh? You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of your Xbox’s blog…or anyone else's Xbox that signed up for the service. Gives a new meaning to the term stalker, huh?

So, the next time you go to game and your significant other gives you ‘that look’…just let them know you need to keep your console company or it will get lonely…and point them to your console’s blog as proof.

Management Excellence at Microsoft

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 21:10:21 GMT

One of the best things about working at Microsoft is the vast training resources that we have at our disposal. Last week, I took a week off work to attend an intensive offsite training course called the Management Excellence Foundation Program (MEFP). This a manager training curriculum put on by the Management Development Group (MDG) at Microsoft and replaces the older Management Essentials class that many people have taken. Taking a week off work completely off email isn't an easy commitment. Not only do you not see your family pretty much for the entire week, but you are completely MIA from your team at work.

This particular training is off-site in Bellevue and is meant as an intensive totally immersive training. Each day started at 7am for breakfast and went until at least 10pm, and most days going much, much later. I'm purposely not going to give away too much about this program as much of the benefit you get is from not knowing everything that is going to happen throughout the duration of the event.

I was apprehensive at first to blog about this, but I feel that this is important enough for the company that I simply have no choice. I don't say this lightly: This course has completely changed my professional life. At the risk of sounding like a zealot Scoble, I'll say this: Through the intensive experiential curriculum and classroom fundamentals, this has given me new hope for managers at Microsoft and the future of the company. This course has reaffirmed my belief that Microsoft will be the breeding ground for the world's best managers. To do this, we transform the fundamental role that managers play, starting manager by manager and team by team.

My call to action to all Microsoft Managers (no matter your level or how many direct reports you have):

1. Go to this training event as soon as you can.

2. Encourage all of your direct reports that are managers to go to this training.

3. Want and Expect to change your fundamental thinking on the role that managers play

To get the most benefit out of this course, you should really have had at least 8-12 months of manager experience in your current role. Having that direct connection to your current job relative to the experiences you get through the course will be very powerful and affect change in you in a very meaningful way.

To find out details for this course, check out the MDG website on the intranet at http://mdg or through the managers portal on HRWeb.

If you are a Microsoft manager interested in chatting more about this event, my experience or simply why I seem like I'm hopped up on crack about it, shoot me an email and we can setup some time to talk.

Compiled list of Windows Live services

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:29:17 GMT

I was thinking to myself "Wouldn't it be nice to have a compiled list of Windows Live services?".. instead of creating this myself, I did a quick search over at www.live.com and found that Cnet has already done this. I guess I can reclaim the 1/2 hour it would have taken me to do this :)

Mix06 here we come!

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 22:01:21 GMT

The much talked about Mix06 conference is coming up in Las Vegas, Nevada next week from March 20-23. Unfortunately I'm not able to attend the innaugural conference this year. However, the next best thing is having someone attend as my pseudo proxy, so I've sent along Mark from my team. It's his first conference as a full fledge full-time Microsoft cog so I'm sure he'll have a blast.

The conference is going to be filled with great sessions, but in particular, I strongly encourage you to attend the session titled "The Windows Live Platform: Build Applications That Have Access to 400 Million Address Books, and 13 Billion Contacts!" put on by Brian Arbogast (one of our VPs) and Ken Levy (Win Live product manager). It's on Monday @ 1:30 in Palazzo Ballroom E-L. In particular, let me know what you think about the demo, platform annoucements and future thinking that is presented in this session. Okay, enough bread crumbs for you Hansel (or Gretel if you prefer).

Other sessions I'm particularly interested in, in order:

-Today's Identity Crisis and the Identity Metasystem (If someone tries to mention Infocard is replacing Passport I'm going to kill someone!)

-Better design built faster: Using new UI technologies to speed developement

-Overview of Live.com gadgets

-Selling the Experience

-Beyond the banner: Advertising on the web and where it's going

-Building AJAX applications using Yahoo! Web Services

-From HTML to Services: Building a site for REST, POX, RSS, SOAP and WS-*

-Introducing Microsoft adCenter - the Next Generation Advertising platform

-Wiring the Web (this is the same session that Ray gave at E-Tech 2006)

-Creating a customized server using IIS 7 modules

If anyone is attending Mix06 and would like to talk to someone from my team, let me know and I can give you Mark's contact information.

Windows Live Messenger beta invites

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:52:42 GMT

Looks like my friends over in Messenger have hooked me up with nearly 20 invites to give out this time around. All you have to do is leave your email address as a comment and I'll send you an invite on a first come, first served basis. When leaving your email address, remember to try obfuscate it to prevent email harvesters from adding you to their spam lists (eg. you (at) hotmail (dot) com)

Windows Live Messenger Beta is no longer in "invite only mode", use this link to be "auto accepted" into the Live Messenger Beta program:

http://ideas.live.com/signup.aspx?versionId=0eccd94b-eb48-497c-8e60-c6313f7ebb73

Office Live team blog

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 04:30:09 GMT

Samarth, my PM cohort over in Office Live has kicked off their team blog with a simple Hello World innaugural post. Drop by and follow the action!

http://spaces.msn.com/officeliveblog/

Some background info:

- What Offive Live is - here

- What Office Live is not - here

- TechCrunch coverage of Office Live Beta launch - here

Social networking in MSN Spaces

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 04:22:06 GMT

Today, Dare talked about the upcoming Social Networking feature in MSN Spaces that was recently launched only in Australia. This is a really exciting feature and long overdue for Spaces to finally ship. Admittedly we have to deal with scale issues that competitors don't, or choose to ignore (as evident by MySpace and Friendster's abysmal performance).

In short, this is easily explained as your circle of freinds where you can see a user's social circle -- literally seeing their friends of friends. With this social networking, it allows users to connect and communicate in really rich ways. This opens up a doorway of really cool features that can depend on this infrastructure and paves the way for spidering out integration into other live services like Expo and Mail to make user experience even richer than it is today.

To see a preview of this in action, check out these test spaces:

http://spaces.msn.com/darestestspace/friends/

http://spaces.msn.com/bruce-a-h/friends/

I'm excited for this to launch in North America.

Origami

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:47:41 GMT

The much-hyped Origami device was launched today, and is what Microsoft is dubbing the "Ultra Mobile PC" or UMPC. It's a smaller than a laptop, but bigger than a pocket PC. It runs full blown Windows XP with a touch-screen and a software shell to improve usability. The thing has USB, Wifi, bluetooth and weighs under 2 pounds.

Here are some obligatory links so I don't have to recap everything:

-Original set of teaser videos -- here, here and here.

-Promo video showing UMPC in "real" life

-Interview with Otto Berkes, GM of the UMPC team

My take:

1. I'm reserving judgement until I get to actually hold on in my hands and try it out. I'm so jealous that Mike and Omar got their grubby hands on a unit already.

2. Setting my gadget obsessed nature aside for a moment, I question how useful this really will be in real life. I already have a notebook and a smartphone. I question whether I'd really use this enough to justify the current price tag ($599-$1000). I read that they will start selling peripherals for Origami devices like keyboards and DVD drives. Are we at risk of just re-creating a larger laptop?

3. I notice that in the promo video it shows women placing the Origami in their purse when their not using it. Where am I going to put this sucker? I wonder how long it'll be before I see a belt holster for this thing :)

4. The price point is just right to compete with a large class of single-purpose devices which could make this a category killer. For example, GPS Units, Sony PSP, and media players like the Archos devices are all within striking distance of an Origami device, but much less powerful.

5. Could the Origami change how people buy PCs and devices? Specifically, could this device target business users to get a more powerful desktop PC and an Origami device on the go? It runs full-blow XP and supports MS Office. Unless you're doing a ton of typing, it might not be necessary to have a full blown keyboard. For me, perhaps I could settle for a cheaper phone (non-smartphone) because the Origami would provide the full connectivity I'd need (email, calendar, etc).

6. What is the battery life going to be like? I've heard 3 hours which isn't nearly long enough. To truly be a lifestyle PC, it has to last at least double that. The last thing you want to do is take this around with you for a day and have to charge it while you're on the go. I'm shuddering at memories of analog cell phones with their horrendous battery life.

7. Will people hold off for 2nd gen Origami devices? At least those that will run Vista that will surely ship at the end of the year? Consumers are much smarter now, and know that new devices in the market get superceded very quickly in favor of new models that are (a) cheaper (b) smaller/sexier (c) more powerful.

Having said all of this, I'm excited to get my hands on one of these devices. I'd love to test drive one for a week and post a full blown review.. If anyone's listening out there and wants a gadget head's brutally honest review, contact me :)

live.com and Search get revamped

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:35:10 GMT

The live.com team is in the middle of deploying their latest release with a whack of new features. Along with the www.live.com release, our buddies over in Search have also shipped some killer features.

live.com

I've been discussing my gripes with Sanaz the past few weeks and I'm happy to say they may have won me back. I'm reserving judgement for a few more days of usage. I'm giving them their fair shake though and will set them as my IE homepage for the time being. I promised Sanaz that if this next release had me raving about their feature set I would put these exact words in my blog: "I love you Sanaz!". There i did it.

Highlight of the new features as I'm discovering them. This list isn't complete as the Live.com team hasn't made the official announcement of their new release yet on their team blog. (Update: Release notes are here)

1. Virtual-page support -- this is the feature I've been asking for what seems like forever. They've finally done it! They've addd the ability for you to have virtual pages within www.live.com, so each page can have a different set of feeds/gadgets. The kicker is that only your first "page" loads when you first visit the page, which allows you to have a minimal start page to have super fast page load times! Previously, the "hide" feature was complete BS. The feeds still loaded in the background, it's just that you couldn't see them. This time they've made the feed loading smarter.

For me, my starting page only has: stock ticker, weather and my Live Mail inbox. My secondary pages have a set of RSS feeds I follow -- one page for coworker's blogs, and another page for industry. I'll probably increase the number of pages I have in the coming days as I experiment.

2. New feed and gadget browser -- they've finally gotten rid of the crazy left hand menu in favor of navigation browser that sits on top. Easier to navigate, easier to drag and drop gadgets/feeds. Overall goodness.

3. Enhanced default gadgets -- weather gadget is too big, but the new weather icons look dead sexy. I love how you can collapse it to a thin title bar.

Expanded:

Collapsed:

4. Love the new UI -- subtle changes to the overall UI. I like the shading around each of the gadgets/feeds. Makes the overall page easier to read and parse.

5. Optimizatizing on feed details -- Every blog entry in a feed has a "[more]" link next to it. Previously, when you clicked this, it took you away from your main page into a feed specific page. This was absolutely horrible as it prevented you from quickly processing a large number of blogs. Now, when you click "[more]", you get a DHTML popup that shows you the blog entry details from the feed. Good stuff.

Search

Just go to www.live.com and start doing a search right on the page to see the killer features. Props to the Search team, you've upped the ante for our competitors.

1. "Unlimited" Search results -- Love how the search results come back in one continuous list, eliminating the need to travel between pages of the result set. This is just AWESOME! Check it out by running this query which search for "Trevin Chow": http://www.live.com/#q=trevin%20chow&offset=1. (Ironically the first 2 hits are my blog and Sanaz's). As you scroll down the list, they use Ajax to get more results, instead of you having to load new pages. This feature is so obvious and so genius.

2. Control search result detail -- in teh upper right corner, there is a 3 position slider to control how much information you see about each listing in the search result. Good idea, but in reality, not sure i would ever choose the most sparse detail since it doesn't give enough. The real goodness comes into play when you opt for the most detail (slide it to the far right). See point #3 below.

3. Initiate a search within a site from the search results -- This is just plain awesome. Make sure you have the search detail slider set to the far right (see #2 above), then execute a search. Notice the line "Search within this site" below each search result? Click it. You can kickoff a site specific search right from the search results. Saves me the trouble of having to use advanced search syntax in the search query box to scope it down to the site level. Just awesome.

4. Image search -- this just ROCKS. Again, they have a seemingly unlimited list of search results, and the image thumbnails come up as they are found. The thumbnails enlarge when you hover over them with the mouse, allowing you to see the site they're from, image properties and you can even send feedback to the search team on the image results. Check this search query out for BMW Z4s to see this in action.

5. Search Macros -- the idea is that someone (or you) can create search macros to help control how Search results are found. For example, you might know that certain sites are best for finding out answers on how to repair Indian Motorcyles, so instead of doing a "dumb" search across the entire web, you scope it to only specific domains. You can control other variables as well like giving preference to certain search terms. Check out the Search Macro gallery to see the set of Macros currently available.

I'm sure there are more features that I'm missing in both products, this is just my initial review. I'll amend this post as necessary.

What are you waiting for, go try both these products out! Go to www.live.com today!

Ray Ozzie on Wiring the Web

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:02:05 GMT

Ray Ozzie's keynote today at E-Tech 2006 was great. I'm not really there, but vicariously living through the excellent coverage through other blogs :) A complete transcript of Ray's speech is captured by Nathan Torkington of O'Reilly. I encourage everyone to go read it, because he's highlighting some great innovation in, what he calls, wiring the web. He discusses a simple programming paradigm to unlock rich scenarios involving basic functions already well known by users (copy, paste, go, back, forward, etc). In particular, he demos a "Live Clipboard" browser application that leverages Javascript and CSS techniques. With simple client script, Ray shows the instantation of "copy and paste" for the browser. When you choose "copy" instead of stupidly copying the image or text itself, client code copies the underlying definition of the object. When you elect to "paste" it then pastes the rich information you just copied to realize a full e2e of copy and paste. This gets even more powerful once you realize that the data you just copied coudl also be pasted into rich client applications like Outlook. Imagine being able to copy an hCal (or some other Microformat) from a website (e.g. Eventful.com) and being able to easily paste that sucker into Outlook and a calendar entry gets created immediately for it. Tell me that wouldn't be cool!

Check out a demo you can play with here: http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/clipboardexample.html

Screencast of Ray giving the demo:

http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/screencast/liveclipdemo.html

Technical details are here and how you can try this out on your own pages:

http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/techPreview.html

Be sure to check our Ray's blog:

http://spaces.msn.com/razyozzie/

Office 12 dogfood is a go

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 02:42:25 GMT

I've been impatiently waiting the past few months to try a build of Office 12 but have been purposely holding off until the builds got more stable and they approached Beta 1. Now they have not only passed Beta 1, but it seems that the Beta 1 technical refresh will be out soon.

I'm about to wipe my entire laptop (thanks to Omar for the pre-flatten checklist) and going to taken the plunge and install Office 12. The primary reason I've been holding off is because of fears (whether rationale or not) that my whole world would come crashing to a halt. Yes, it sounds melodramatic but Office is the center of my universe both at home and at work. Outlook is open every minute of every day that I'm at work (and sometimes when I'm at home, sigh). Word is started about 50 times a day (not including when I compose email). Excel comes in handy when I need to crunch numbers at work or at home for my personal budgeting. Powerpoint is used both to view slide material prepared by others, but also for myself to do the same.

If there was a showstopping bug that prevented functionality I used, my productivity would come screaching to a halt. At first I thought it was funny how my life is so wrapped up with dependance on Office and all of it's great features, when I realize that with Windows it's the same way :)

Internally at work, I've gotten recommendation to try out the Beta 1 tech refresh from Brandon, who is not only a great friend of mine but a rockstar PM over in Excel (unfortunately he has no work blog). He personally gave the Beta 1 TR 2 thumbs up.

I still remember using Wordstar then followed up by Word for DOS back in the day. Much later I was my dad's slave where I had to install Office from an insane 25 3.5" disks (disclaimer: it might not really have been 25 disks, but it felt like it at the time). Nothing is worse than trying to come up with optimal way to spend your time installing from 25 disks. Time passes so slowly when you watch the progress bar, then if you try to do something else out of boredom, you miss the optimal time to swap disks makign the overall install time longer than necessary. Imagine being 13 years old trying to compute the throughput of my disk drive based on the time necessary for each install disk. Now that I put this in writing, I realize I was a geek at a really young age. Any ways....

Here is my prediction of how my experience will be:

Time 0: Install. Wondering why it's takes so long. Question whether this software could ever be realistically delivered over broadband through electronic software distribution.

+ 25 mins: Amazement and wonder at the new UI. Totally disregard any type of documentation and just start "using it".

+ 25 mins: Still in amazement, but noticing a few seams and performance problems.

+ 2 hours: Gotten over initial shock and awe, and trying to do some real work. Getting a bit frustrated because I can't find certain features anymore. Learning curve is really shallow due to the great new UI ribbon.

+ 2 days: Nothing but good things to say. I post on my blog raving about how cool Office 12 is.

+ 2 days: I have nothing but bad things to say, pissing and moaning probably followed up by a blog post on "I can't believe they did XXXX" where XXXX is a feature or behavior I used to like in Office 11.

Let's see how close my prediction is. Next stop, wiping my laptop.

Windows Live Local adds "Drive by"!

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:37:31 GMT

Mike states it very well by saying "HO... LY COW!". I'm amazed at this... Windows Live Local has added "drive by" views of city streets. This means that you can position a virtual little car on a map and see actual photos street level views as if you were inside the car. Albeit it's still in "preview" mode and coverage isn't totally comprehensive, but holy smokes!

Check it out: http://preview.local.live.com/

Windows Live Local team.. you rock!

PS -- I especially find it funny to turn the car around and "drive" down one-way streets the wrong way :)

Windows Defender launches

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 02:54:14 GMT

Windows Defender got released yesterday, which replaces the product formerly known as "Windows Antispyware". The UI has been all changed up (in a good way), is easier to use and even supports 64-bit environments. Go download it now!

More Windows Live Messenger beta invites

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 01:39:34 GMT

Back by popular demand.. Santa Chow is back with 5 more Windows Live Messenger beta invites. As before, drop a comment with your email address and i'll shoot you an invite.

Invitations will be sent out on a first come, first served basis. When leaving your email address, remember to try obfuscate it to prevent email harvesters from adding you to their spam lists.

Changes in MSN Spaces

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:18:18 GMT

Summary of the recent great enhancements to MSN Spaces that caught my eye:

1. Added ability to make money with your space! With a partnership with Kanoodle, you can add an advertising module and make some cold hard cash. Just add the "Sponsored Links" module and sign-up for an account through the link provided within the module.

2. New Live Contacts feature which allows you to publish your contacts to your friends. You update your profile (eg. your phone number or email address) and all of your contacts get the info instantly. Suh-weet!

4. No more storage limit on photos you can upload, and you can upload up to 500 photos per month.

5. New spaces search

6.Merge between MSN Member Directory and your MSN Spaces. This never made sense to me why we had redundant member profile stores, but now we finally fixed this. It's been combined into a single "MSN Spaces Profile".

7. Finally got rid of the "/members/" in the URL.. nice touch!

Kudos to the MSN Spaces team!

Parking gone wild at Microsoft

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 03:52:58 GMT

I never thought I'd actually blog about this, but parking and overall office space is getting crazy at Microsoft (Update: looks like Omar coincidentally commented on this as well)

We recently moved from the Redwest-D to Building 119 based on a criteria that is a complete mystery to everyone on our team. They couldn't have picked a worse team to move due to our close tie with all the other MSN and Windows Live teams (which are still in the Redwest campus) -- I have to drive back to Redwest at least twice a day for meetings. I think I'm getting 5mpg in my car right now on average.

While we were in Redwest you could sense an office space issue cropping up over the last 2 years. More people were getting doubled up with contractors sometimes seen quadrupled up! The only thing that saves you from the dreaded "office mate" is your senority at the company relative to the rest of the peeps on your team. I've had my own office for nearly 2 years now, so let's hope I don't move to a team like Windows anytime soon with 12+ year veterans. Otherwise i'll find myself sharing an office with 4 interns.

The office space situation isn't nearly as bad as the parking is getting. As soon as we moved to 119, i quickly realized that we had a problem. If you don't arrive before 10am, you are pretty much out of luck. You will drive around for 10-15 mins, then realize that you have to go park in a parking lot for another building then trek back to our building. If you need to go to another building for a meeting not in the immediate vicinity, you don't dare take your car. If you do, and try to come back, your spot will be gone (little did you know, your spot was gone 4.3 secs after you drove out of it).

The other day I made the mistake of taking my car when I went off-site for lunch. When I came back, not only were all parking spots taken, but all the illegal ones AND handicapped spots were taken too! Our parking security must have killed several rainforests with the amount of "parking tickets" that were written and tow trucks were out in full force -- i even saw a car get towed last night at 10:45pm.

This isn't happening at only our building, but also lots of other buildings in the redmond campus. It's sheer insanity. I now have to 2 things which are crazy to me: (1) actively manage my parking spot and (2) keep my exchange inbox < 200MB (we'll save #2 for a future rant).

Thankfully, Microsoft has recently snatched up the nearby Safeco buildings for a cool $209 million. Back in 2004, Microsoft bought the 20-acre Eddie Bauer buildings for $38 million. Lastly, we expanded into office space recently vacated by Cingular Wireless at Redmond Town Center.

While this all sounds like good news to solve our space issues, I have my doubts:

1. How fast will we be moving teams there? How building renovation are we doing?

2. How will they decide what teams to move? Will it move another Identity Services-like team and shaft them in the process making them commute between buildings more?

3. If we continue to hire at the rate we are (we've certainly hired several thousand over the past 2 years), where are these people sitting?

One things for sure, I certainly don't envy our facilities department. It's like managing a small city except our residents are more angry and outspoken :)

More Windows Live Messenger beta invites

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 04:19:40 GMT

I small interruption to my CES 2006 coverage... I've got 10 more Windows Live Messenger beta invites to dish

out. As before, drop a comment with your email address and i'll shoot you an invite. My last post on this generated the most comments my blog has ever seen, so it seems people are reading/visiting my blog, they just needed bait to come out of their cave :)

Invitations will be sent out on a first come, first serve basis. When leaving your email address, remember to try obfuscate it to prevent email harvesters from adding you to their spam lists :)

Update: Invites are all gone (at least until i get more)