Here are some a lot more holiday-season posts you might have missed in case you had been away out of your Pc the previous couple of weeks. Microsoft historians are most likely to come across these hyperlinks specially well-worth a read. Redmond Developer News features a long but fascinating Q&A with Brad Silverberg, the former Microsoft Windows 95 and Internet Explorer chief who went on to help found the Ignition Partners venture-capital firm (whose employee roster reads like a who's who of former Softie big-wigs). The RedDevNews folks got Silverberg talking about his philsophies of managing large development projects, as nicely as his critique of the Windows Vista development project/process. Among the Silverberg sound bytes: "(Vista's development) was Cairo all over again. It failed for the same reason Cairo failed. I am a believer in incremental development. Get the biggest risk things out of the way first and then just continually develop on it; get something done and then build on it. Get the next thing and build on it, get the next thing and build on it. Instead of a big bang. It never works. I worked on a big bang earlier in my career called the Lisa at Apple. It was a big bang-it failed in spectacular fashion." (People who remember tales of Silverberg and Vista leader Jim Allchin's head-to-head disagreements over the future of Windows and the Web may take Silverberg's critiques with a grain of salt.) Over on LiveSide.net,
Office Enterprise 2007 Key, Harrison Hoffman provides an insider's look at the not-so-long,
Office Professional Plus 2010 Key, but winding history of Windows Live. If the myriad Windows Live codenames and (non)announcements have left you confused,
Office Home And Stude/nt, this post is for you. Meanwhile,
Office Home And Stude/nt 2010, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop has created an analysis, using cloud tags,
Windows 7 Code/, of Microsoft executive speeches and articles from 195 to the present. Should you want a quick, graphic way to compare what was/is top-of-mind for Microsoft's leaders, this is a cool tool.