I was at a seminar yesterday with other attendees from various companies. Of course, introducing myself as a Microsoft employee, and compounded by the fact that the two instructors had worked with Microsoft in consulting capacities, I was automatically approached as an individual representative of the whole company. In this way, any reference that was made to Microsoft was addressed to me as if it was something personal. One of the instructors at one point asked my permission to tell a story about Microsoft that had nothing to do with me.

With this kind of response, which is just as true today as it was twenty years ago, I wondered if the same thing would happen if I was an employee of, say, Boeing. That is, would people expect me to be answerable or responsible for their experiences with a 737 in the same way they do about their experiences with a Windows PC? It didn't seem like it.

What I realized is that people approach Microsoft employees more personally because their own relationship to Microsoft is essentially a personal one--personal, daily, and often for-much-of-the-day interaction with a Windows computer of some kind. Their interaction with most other things, like a Boeing 737, is much more sporadic and much less personal (the airline owns and operates the airplane). And so the tendency is to then project that intimacy with one's computer--more speciifcally, the software--to a personal representative of the company that makes it.

It's also that 90% of computer users are on Windows, so any group that contains professionals--which are the kinds of people you meet in such seminars contains probably 90% Microsoft customers. And those who aren't probably have a strong opinion as to why, because of their intimate relationship with another computer system.

I have a hard time thinking of any other technological relationship that gets projected in this way. With automobiles, there is much more of a mixture--many manufacturers, many different models, so a representative from, say, Chevrolet, wouldn't have the same experience unless they were specifically attending a meeting of Chevrolet owners.

Personally, I'm not bothered by how people respond to learning that I'm employed by Microsoft. I'm not in the least way shamed by the relationship and, in fact, deeply honor it. Indeed, when I attend such seminars and hear some of what people experience in other workplaces, I'm increasingly grateful for the fabulous environment in which I'm blessed to spend my professional hours.

I've been wanting to add some recordings to my Music Performances page for a while, primarily pieces from a Christmas concert of last December. I finally got a chance to do that just now, and also added two other pieces on that page from 2007 that I found while consoldating some backup hard drives.

Call it "New Blogger's Dilemma." Many people start a blog with high hopes, yet get stuck early on because of how prominent these first posts will be in the overall mix. I've been facing this with my own here--though I have much to write about that's not related to my work at Microsoft, the question is, where to begin? What subject shall I choose? Spirituality? Politics? Science? The Arts? What do I want to stand out in my tag cloud in the early stages of this blog? It's been a hard choice, but eventually one must choose or perish, blogwise.

So I've finally chosen to start with the subject of children. With a toddler in my life (Liam is almost three), children have been a significant part of my reality in recent years. He's also a primary reason why, as I noted in my "returning to Microsoft" piece, that I'm back at Microsoft in the first place. Recently, too, some friends of mine forwarded a link to Tim Kreider's The Referendum (NY Times blogs) whose ponderances on the fates of the childless (with "an obscene amount of free time") and the child-laden (whose "next thousand Saturdays are already booked") provides much mental fodder.

In recalling my thinking on the subject from some years ago, what might have been a short blog post turned into a longer article, which is posted on my main site. The basic thesis is that the question of which life path is more valid (which is more or less what Kreidler is asking) is not about having children or not having children, but about living either path on auto-pilot versus living either path consciously. Conscious living--making clear, conscious choices based on realities larger than ego-gratification--is really the solution to the perpetual doubt of living on auto-pilot.  

Written June 30^th, 2009

This is meant to be an insert within a forthcoming "What Exactly Does One Do With 'Oslo'?" article; originally it was part of that piece but tended to make the whole thing somewhat lengthy!

Some of you may remember the work I did in my "version 1.0" career at Microsoft, which spanned the years between 1990 and 1996. During most of that time I worked as a software engineer in the Developer Relations Group (which eventually turned into Developer & Platform Evangelism) with the purpose of helping developers outside of Microsoft understand and apply our technologies. In this capacity I ended up as the industry expert on the OLE and COM technologies. This put me on stage at many developer conferences and saw the publication of Inside OLE 2 (1993) and Inside OLE 2^nd Edition (1995).

At that time, the focus was pretty much on desktop applications; client-server applications were really just starting to hit the mainstream, including web applications. And that was the very point at which I retired from the high-tech scene altogether. (For the complete story of my first career, which many people tell me isn't actually boring at all, see my book, Mystic Microsoft.)

Thus I completely missed out on the evolution of Microsoft's component technologies beyond the desktop. While people like my friend Don Box were circling the globe talking about DCOM, .NET, and all kinds of new middle-tier and enterprise-level stuff like Microsoft Transaction Server, App Server, BizTalk Server, and what have you, I was off doing completely different things (see www.kraigbrockschmidt.com). To what extent I fiddled with technology, it was pretty much still limited to client apps, managing a few Access databases, and putting together some simple websites. What I learned of .NET was pretty slim, just enough to be mildly confused.

Ironically, the chap who was my direct manager when I wrote this, the very visible Chris Sells, got started in all this shortly before my exit. Having started his path with COM at one of my presentations, he eventually worked with Don Box at DevelopMentor where he earned his living, as he puts it, "telling people how to minimize round-trips in DCOM." Since then he's been pretty deeply immersed in the heart of efforts like Microsoft code name "Oslo."

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