Global Nerdy

In a post I made yesterday, I asked you to read an article that I wrote during my Microsoft days and see if you could spot what part of the article garnered me a huffy email to my skip-level (that’s Microsoft’s Newspeak for “the boss of my boss”) from none other than Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows division. Next to Steve Ballmer, Sinofsky is probably the most powerful guy at The Empire, as no undertaking of any import takes place at Microsoft happens without at least the tacit approval of the people who control Windows and Office, the geese that lay the golden eggs. This is why the Courier tablet got killed. Getting up Sinofsky’s nose is akin to stretching clear plastic wrap across Darth Vader’s toilet: it’s amusing, but there are consequences.

Like Darth Vader, higher-ups at Microsoft prefer to use the Force and choke you from a distance. In this case, the Force was my skip-level. He had made the long and arduous climb to level 63 and wasn’t going to have his best-laid plans undone by a blog post. Microsoft has employee levels, just like World of Warcraft, and in both, the real fun begins at level 60 (I myself was a level 61 employee).

The anonymous Microsoft insider blogger Mini-Microsoft astutely notes that the unwritten rule for success at Microsoft — and especially for climbing past level 62 — is “Influence if you can, scare if you must”. It’s good, sound, if somewhat Machiavellian advice, but in the Ayn-Rand-meets-Asperger’s upper echelons of The Empire, that rule all-too-often gets interpreted as “Scare! Scare! Make them crap their pants!”

So he did what any level 63 with any sense does: he delegated. He asked my manager “Should we fire him?” My manager, being one of the good guys and understanding the true message of my post, said “Nah, he’s cool.” In the end, I got a slap on the wrist and life, or what passes for it as a Microsoftie, went on.

Some contestants  were under the impression that it was referring to the big tabletop computing device then known as Surface as “The Big-Ass Table” got me in trouble. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Microsoft can be cool — really, they can — and they’re just not uptight enough to get riled about the term “big-ass”.

Some contestants also guessed that it was referring to Microsoft as “The Empire” that got me in trouble. Nope. It’s done internally all the time, and often to great effect by such people as Lauren Cooney, former leader of Microsoft’s Web Platform Team, who has dressed up at Darth Vader from time to time for events and presentations, and Ariel Meadow Stallings, another ex-Microsoftie, who handed out “I am the Empire” shirts to fellow bloggers.

For the record, here are the bits that got me in trouble:

I believe that over the next few months, you’ll see some interesting touch-related stuff coming from Microsoft, and that we have a responsibility to help developers understand the differences between mouse/keyboard computing and touch computing.

We’re aware of the challenges of touch (and other sensor) input and over the next little while, you’ll see our answers to those challenges. And better still, we’ll share what we’ve learned in order to make you better developers and designers of software that use these new interfaces.

I got in trouble because they were forward-looking statements. Microsoft is a publicly-traded company, and such statements, as obvious and harmless as they might seem, are the sorts of things on which investors make decisions and the wrong statement has the potential to play havoc with the stock price. For a Fortune 50 company, even a fraction of a penny’s change can mean millions of dollars. This in turn can mess with several people’s year-end reviews and promotion opportunities. Only at such an organization can the stakes be simultaneously so high and so low.

The contest winner is Kevin Dean, who submitted this guess at 3:30 p.m. yesterday:

My guess is you got blasted for “making a pre-announcement” when all you were doing was speculating.

As the winner, Kevin had the choice of claiming either my near-mint-condition Zune HD or his choice of a Manning Publications ebook. He went for Manning’s iOS in Practice, which means that the Zune will stay in my museum of forgotten-but-well-meaning electronic devices. My congratulations to Kevin and thanks to everyone who participated!

Lance Ulanoff wrote in Mashable that Microsoft’s vision for touchscreen computers is the right one. He argues that the ergonomic principle known as Gorilla Arm (which states that our gorilla-like arms aren’t designed to be held in front of us, making fine motions, for more than brief periods of time) doesn’t apply to devices like laptops and the Surface in “kickstand mode”. He found it natural to switch back and forth between touching the screen and using the keyboard and mouse. He also found himself absorbing the Windows 8 gestures — which Marco Arment said were non-intuitive in his article An Alternate Universe — so well that found himself absent-mindedly trying to use them on his iPad.

A day later, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote pretty much the same thing in his article, titled Do You Wanna Touch, which concludes with this paragraph:

 The received wisdom about touchscreen interaction with computers was that it didn’t work. That you’d get “gorilla arm”. That’s why we had to have special tablet devices. But Surface proves that’s not true; typing and touching are spectacularly compatible, at least for laptops. And I’m beginning to wonder about my desktop a little, because lately I’m starting to I think I wanna touch that, too.

This reminds me of something I wrote a couple of years ago…

On August 1st, 2010, when I was a Developer Evangelist and Windows Phone Champ at Microsoft, I posted an article titled A Touchy Subject both here and in Microsoft Canada’s blog, Canadian Developer Connection. I was working at Microsoft at the time and wrote it in response to an Ars Technica article titled Ballmer (and Microsoft) Still Doesn’t Get the iPad; the gist of the article is “As a matter of fact, we do get touch.”

The article got a lot of comments, including one you never saw: a huffy email to my skip-level (that Microsoftese for “My manager’s manager”) from non other than Steven Sinofsky himself, President of Windows and Windows Live, who suggested that I be reprimanded for one thing in that article. I’m offering your choice of one of the following small prizes to the first person who can tell me what that one thing was:

• My near-mint condition Zune HD (“the best portable media player you’ll never buy”)
• A Manning Publications ebook of your choice

Here’s a photo of my newly-refurbished laptop, fresh from my startup’s pivot and ready to go build some cool and useful mobile software.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Last night, Brad Feld spoke to a packed room of people from Toronto’s tech, social media and entrepreneurial scene at the Toronto Reference Library about building startup communities. Here are my notes from his presentation:

• I moved to Boulder in 1995
• It turns out that when you’re constantly criss-crossing the US, living in the middle of the country works out well
• My wife and there came there because we liked it – we didn’t know anyone there
• I started to get engaged with Boulder entrepreneurial community
• For those of you who aren’t familiar with Boulder, it’s very much a hippie town, with the creative class and counterculture
• University makes for 25 – 30% of the population
• Lots of smarts engineers, no management or sales talent
• Started to reflect on his journey from 95 on
• By 2010, Boulder recognized as a great startup community
• Done without promotion
• Cofounded Techstars in 2006
• Founded Founders Group in 2007

• My book is based on four principles
• My publisher wanted these principles to be given a name, and they suggested “the Boulder Thesis”
• It’s their contribution to the content of the book

The Four Principles:

1. The startup community has to be led by entrepreneurs

• Separate the world into 2 categories: leaders and feeders
• Both are critically important; they’re just different
• Feeders can’t lead
• Leaders don’t have to be entrepreneurs; just a critical mass of them
• Feeders can have individuals who have leadership roles
• It’s the difference between a network and a hierarchy
• Startups are inherently networked
• Feeders tend to be hierarchical organizations
• “The intersection of hierarchies and networks is not very pleasant”
• They can have constructive relationships together, but they are different things

2. You have to make a long-term commitment

• It’s a generational thing: about 20 years
• The generational view continues far into the future
• Most other organizations don’t run on cycles this long
• 2 to 4 years is not long enough for an entrepreneurial company
• In 2008, the global economic crisis was a disaster to many people, but not to entrepreneurs in Boulder
• “Who here watches CNN? Turn that shit off!”
• To an entrepreneur, the US election is just entertainment

3. You have to be inclusive of anyone who wants to engage, at any level

• Yes, it means you’ll let in bad actors
• The startup organism rejects bad actors in the end
• It’s not a zero-sum game – we’re so far from saturating that there’s room for everyone; startups are such a small part of the business ecosystem

4. You have to have activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack across the board

• Accelerators, Startup Weekend, a regular cadence of activities, all together and continually
• Anyone who wants to participate should be able to
• You don’t have to get permission or a licence: you just start it!

• There’s a philosophy deeply rooted in the Boulder community: “Give before you get”
• It’s the difference between being an advisor and being a mentor
• Advisor: “I will help you in exchange for something”
• Mentor: “How can I help you?”
• Everyone has something to offer…everyone can be a mentor
• In Boulder, people give more than they get in the short run, but they end up getting more than they give
• If you want to build a long-term viable ecosystem, make sure that there’s a critical mass of entrepreneurs leading
• It’s not a zero-sum game; everyone benefits!

Here’s a tweet from David Crow that he made earlier this afternoon:

Alright Superstorm Sandy, you can ground airplanes but we can still get @bfeld to Toronto tomorrow. #superhero
— David Crow (@davidcrow) October 29, 2012

The @bfeld he’s referring to is none other than Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group, cofounder of TechStars, investor, entrepreneur and author. He’s scheduled to come to Toronto tomorrow (Tuesday, October 30th) to talk at a StartupNorth event about building a local startup community:

In spite of Hurricane Sandy, he’s still showing up. Word has it that he’s changed his travel plans so that he’s coming in by train rather than plane and will thus be able to make his appearance tomorrow. It looks as though tickets for this event are still available, and if you want to see him and hang out with the local startup scene, register now!

Congratulations to Tris Hussey, who’s the new editor-in-Chief of iPhoneHacks.com! iPhoneHacks is a site devoted to all things iOS, whether it’s iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or iWhatever devices; if you’re an iOS device owner, you’ll want to check this site out every couple of days. I’ve know Tris since my days at Tucows — he’s an author who’s written a lot about social media and tech, a blogger with b5media, and an all-round internet rogue.

Once again: congrats, Tris! I look forward to seeing what you do with iPhoneHacks.