Ahh, back in vegas for pre-Mix event activities.  Hanging with the "UX Eco Team", our global v-team that comprisies User Experience Evangelists and the 20 or so product managers who look after the Expression Studio business.  The excitement is contagious, team is really fired up as we bring all of the planes in for landing Monday morning in the keynote at Mix...

Fun to see the excitement building elsewhere... i keep getting sent little snippets from here and there with various prognostications re: what we will or won't have to say monday.  Good news is that Monday is almost here... have to remember to enjoy the moment. 

More monday.

So I’m sitting here at work late at night working on some of Mix content and announcements for next week (April 30^th), and my thoughts keep coming back to “we need more people working on this stuff”. Well, the irony is that we actually have a over 30 open positions for marketing, product management, evangelism, business development, etc. roles related to our tools and platform… we’re just having a really hard time finding the right people.

So in addition to talking to my friends in the industry and having positions posted on Linkedin and other community job boards, I guess it’s high time I blog about it! We’re hiring!!

So, if you have a passion for the technology space (tools and APIs for graphical GUI and interactive UI, web media, RIA, standards based websites…) and if you are interested in Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, Expression, or Visual Studio product management, product marketing, evangelism, technical advocacy, or any other role that you think might apply (in many locations worldwide, US and international, but especially in lovely Redmond Washington ) give us a shout! You can email me directly at forest dot key at Microsoft dot com (email obfuscated to avoid spam).

First of all, WOW. What an amazing amount of excitement and press/web coverage for Silverlight. I was absolutely exhausted last week from the press tour we did and the very interesting conversations we had with journalists, analysts, partners, and designer/developers that we met with… alas I felt greatly rewarded by the quantity and quality of discussion that was generated from all points of the industry, everything from general business coverage, the media industry, and the web development and design community. And we’re just getting started, as we have a lot more to talk about in just 2 weeks at our Mix event April 30^th.

Being here this week reminded me of how I felt 15 years ago at my first NAB, when Avid had just introduced the early Media Composer and digital video editing began its march to transform the industry. I feel like a similar wave is arriving, one in which Silverlight will play an important role in driving creative innovation, lowering costs, and improving scalability and performance of media applications on the web. What we think of as “interactive” media today, usually limited to DVD like navigation and not much else, is just the very earliest of creative concepts that will be imagined in the years to come.

Nothing is better for a software product guy/gal than hearing the oohs and ahhs of customers in response to cool demos that you have labored for months or years to create—and in our off-the-show-floor meeting rooms we’ve been having great conversations with leading media companies who keep bringing more of their peers back for repeat viewings of some of the early prototypes of partner content that will be launching in the weeks and months ahead. However the highlight of my day to day was something unexpected, completely non-technical or business related:

Over the course of about 90 minutes I ran into three former colleagues of mine, now all at Adobe, each working on different aspects of technology that either directly competes with projects that I work on, or have been mistakenly characterized by the press as doing so! In each case it was just great to see them—to hear how they were doing, to find out about the vacations they had taken to mexico, how their 5 year old was handling playdates with other children, how they had spent time off remodeling homes and flipping them in the market, and the usual “where is so and so working now” networking and search for lost colleagues…. Oh, and we talked about work too, and how excited we are about the industry, and the opportunities for us professionally within our teams, and the expected growth in our target market, what we have liked and disliked about our current employers, and about our crummy commutes and recent horrible work/life balance challenges given the amount of stuff we are working on, etc. And as we said goodbye we wished one another luck, and joked about seeing each other at the next web 2.0 conference (there seems to be one every 3 weeks in the US right now)… and indeed a couple of them I’ll follow-up with in a few weeks to suggest they might consider moving to seattle so we can work together more closely (just kidding)… anyways, this is the face of the “Microsoft-Adobe Death Match, NAB 2007” that the press talked about this week that I’ll remember most about this NAB—underneath the hyperbole and the troll running amuck on the blog comments, there’s just some cool people, doing cool stuff, passionate about their work, and a really exciting, wide open market that is emerging and going to change the world. Designers, developers, and consumers everywhere will benefit.  I’m really glad to be a part of it, and glad to have friends to share that joy and excitement with…

I'm in vegas!, and together with some colleagues I had the incredible experience of seeing Prince perform last night at the Rio Casino's 3121 club.  Prince has definitely still got "it"--incredible presence, virtuouso guitar, and time perfected master showman skills that make everyone have a great time when he is in da house.  As I was contemplating at the end of the show, gazing at the spinning "symbol" that he famously changed his name to, I was reminded of my excitement at our "WPF/E"'s technology's soon to be new identity.

Yes, the "technology formerly known as" WPF/E can now be known as Microsoft Silverlight. 

Ok, so the heckling can end (which was well deserved for the WPFE loveliness), as Silverlight is a great brand for this technology--it suggests the attributes of better, richer, more compelling, more productive and satisfying web experiences.  We had a lot of fun testing the name (and the runner ups, none of which were called "Microsoft Media Player", by the way...) and hearing from end user consumers, as well as designers and developers.  What struck me over and over and over again, and has for three years now since my arrival at msft, is how engaged and eager the community is to learn of Microsoft's entry into this part of the market... it's going to be a lot easier to have a conversation about Silverlight then it was for "wa-pu-fee" (as we often annunciated the former name).

We are going from a crappy code name to a great product name... but as with the 1980s auteur from Minnesotta, the name is not the real issue.  Silverlight will be measured by how it tranforms the experiences of consumers and businesses in the years ahead, and by the creative and technical capabilities that it puts in the hands of designers and developers.

I'll be blogging a lot more about Silverlight, this week about Silverlight and it's very cool features for cost-effective, high quality deliver of media... and in the weeks ahead leading up to our Mix event April 30th and beyond about the broader development story, tooling, and more

Go to an interactive design or web conference and ask an audience to raise their hands if they are “designers”, then again if they are “developers”, and I am always surprised to see that as much as a third (and sometimes more) of the crowd will just stare back at you perplexed, annoyed, or with playful contempt.  Turns out the label “designer” and “developer” are pretty ill suited to describe many of the ranks of folks who build applications, interactive content, and websites.  More than two distinct populations, these folks form a continuum of personalities, training, passions, and skills that span across uber-design (say, graphic illustration or photography) to uber-development (writing low-level drivers for devices, or algorithms for image processing)… while the majority of folks might be comfortable with one of these terms, for many they fail to deliver any real insight.

However there are a few statements I’d go on the record as making about the two populations that I think are unequivocally true (and are correlated in numerous quantitative research projects we have conducted):

• Designers tend to wear black clothes, often turtlenecks, as much as 67% of the time in winter months
• Developers like free t-shirts received at tech conferences (or as morale boosters at work), where as designers tend to use these shirts as extra materials for collages and cleaning up acrylic paint from their art-boards
• Most designers can’t do math or quantitative thinking above a high-school level, rather, they make decisions purely through emotional intuition and guessing
• Developers don’t understand modern art, don’t attend techno or electronic live performances, and only read non-fiction books
• And contrary to popular belief, Santa Claus is a designer, not a developer…

Yes, the point is that any characterization of “designer” or “developers” is bound to fail, and the above examples are merely a yarn.  But I bet I had (many of) you on “designers wear black”…

By now you’ve heard about Microsoft Expression, a new product family from Microsoft “for professional web and interactive designers”.  Yes, “designers”, not “developers” (haven’t I fully undermined the validity of those terms yet?)  Coupled with our Visual Studio product line for “developers”, the two product lines together aim to radically improve the process of collaboration amongst teams of “designer/developers”.  We think role specific tools will help users with different skill sets, sensibilities, and passions to feel more at home in their tool of choice, while simultaneously allowing everyone to just swap projects/files and iterate along the way from concept to delivery of a project. 

Back in December of 2006 we shipped Expression Web (the rest of the Expression Studio is coming really soon (this quarter)) and we decided NOT to include it within any of the MSDN Subscriptions that many developers and organizations use to stay up to date on all things msft platform/tools.  That was a tough decision because clearly design/experience is becoming a more integral part of the development process.  Not to mention many developers do “design”, and many more still might want to do “design” in the future, why shouldn’t they have access to the product? – or so the question we asked ourselves, and boy did we hear it asked of us from our customer base!  As we listened to the 1000s of points of feedback on this decision, we turned our attention to Expression Blend, and the similar question of whether the interactive design tool in the Expression Studio would likewise be included or not in MSDN subscriptions. 

Along the way of this dialog with customers and numerous in person meetings and visits to studios and dev shops where real work between designers/developers is taking place, one thing kept striking us over and over again was: whether or not “developers” will actually use Expression or be more satisfied/active inside of Visual Studio, the larger issue is that by not having access to Expression Web/Blend, we might introduce complexity in the designer/developer collaboration that has been so much of our focus in building the Expression family.

As of today we are adding Expression Web to MSDN Premium subscriptions (and the greater Team Edition offerings), and it will be available for download immediately.  This is the full product license, per other products available in MSDN subscriptions.  We are also going to include Expression Blend  in these subscriptions once it ships. By doing so, we know that we are doing the right thing for not only “developers”, but hope this will also benefit “designers” who adopt the full Expression Studio and work on teams collaboratively with “devs”.  So much of what we are delivering in our platforms (ASP.NET, “WPF/E”, WPF) can only fully be exploited and realized when both the visual/interactive/emotional design is coupled with the functional, programmatic, deployable and secure manifest—and that is the focus that drove this decision, irrespective of what you call the person who does what on the project.

Check out Soma’s blog on the subject for another perspective.