Tuesday arrived here in Seattle with it’s usual grey outlook and more drizzle - it’s strange how you can travel thousands of miles and yet still feel like you’re back home. This is one pretty damp city in April. Someone mentioned to me that Seattle gets about the same rainfall as many other cities in the USA, but it’s little and often compared to the downpours other states get, so it just feels wetter.
Yesterday we spent our first day on the Microsoft campus. Shipping 1700 MVPs from hotels around the city to Redmond is no mean task and it seems like the organisers here did a great job of handling the logistics.
I won’t go into the specifics of what we discussed, but we had the opportunity to meet with a much larger cross-section of the people who develop Windows Home Server than I have done previously, and they’re a really varied bunch of people from all over the world united by a desire to keep building a great product, and fixing any issues that exist in that product today (some more serious than others).
The general format of our two days is to spend them shut away in a conference room talking around each specific area of the product (say “Storage” or “Backup”) - we meet a Developer and Program Manager for that area, they talk through what they’re responsible for, and then get into what they’re working on right now for Power Pack 1, which as you know, will be going into a public beta soon, and then what features they have in mind for further releases in the future.
The focus is definitely on listening as well as talking - there’s a clear desire to hear what the community wants in future versions of Windows Home Server, and the list of features you created over in the forums has been really useful in helping me suggest what the priority should be from your point of view. The insight I have from yesterday is that the team already have a bigger list of features they could work on than you or I could could possibly imagine - the key is picking the ones that will be most useful/ impactful/ differentiating/ sellable (I guess) for us and those people who haven’t yet wandered into the Windows Home Server world.
We went through until about 5pm at which point my jet-lag was kicking in, which on this trip seems to be a signal for someone to open up a free bar. Sure enough, we had a joint get together with the Small Business Server MVPs (the products are close cousins, and we’ve got to know many of them well over the past few days) on a boat which toured around the area for a few hours.
Today will work in a similar way to yesterday - we talk through the remaining areas of Windows Home Server as well as have the opportunity to find out what’s happening on the hardware front. Same format, different content, same weather I’m sure.
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