Nov 17The Appearance of CompetenceI first wrote an internal version of this blog post when managing the Microsoft Office development team and I recently had two people tell me they searched it out in the depths of Microsoft’s old SharePoint portal to send out to their teams. …Management2 min readManagement2 min read
Jun 14Incrementalism Isn’t So BadWhile incrementalism has a bad rap if you’re trying to revolutionize an industry, it’s an important characteristic if you’re trying to build a responsive application. Most applications have a data model that gets transformed into some view model which is then used to draw the view that is presented to…Programming8 min readProgramming8 min read
Nov 16, 2022What Really Happened With Office and Windows 8I was looking forward to reading the discussion of Office and Windows 8 in Steven Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” substack, but was pretty disappointed when it finally showed up. There were a ton of tough discussions between Windows and Office at the time, all surrounded by a vast cloud of uncertainty…Microsoft5 min readMicrosoft5 min read
Oct 26, 2022APIs Don’t MatterAPIs don’t matter?!? That’s quite a hot take from someone who’s claimed that the Win32 (Microsoft Windows) and iOS (iPhone and iPad) application programming interfaces (APIs) represent two of the most valuable technical moats in business history. But hear me out. I will warn that I am going to brutally…11 min read11 min read
Published inDave’s Redistricting·Oct 12, 2022Racial Dot Map in DRA2020DRA2020 now provides the ability to overlay a “racial dot map” on your map as you draw or view your map. Like demographic precinct or district coloring, the racial dot map layer provides insight into the mix of race and ethnicities within a particular area. Each colored dot represents a…4 min read4 min read
Oct 3, 2022Time to Bury This Old Stale Project Management TrilemmaI saw another tweet recently about this tired old triangle of project management. Really the whole framing is nonsense and should be buried for good. The basic framing is that a project can be “feature-driven”, “date-driven” or “quality-driven”, but you can only pick two of these — if you try…Engineering Mangement5 min readEngineering Mangement5 min read
Sep 7, 2022Surprising AutomataI took the opportunity of a recent mild case of Covid with attendant quarantine episode to finally work my way through Stephen Wolfram’s 1200 page opus A New Kind of Science. Only 20 years after it was published! This book probably needs a year-long graduate course to really absorb or…Automata9 min readAutomata9 min read
May 19, 2022What Color is Your Function? You Better Know!I never got around to commenting on this somewhat notorious post What Color is Your Function, by Bob Nystrom. This was from 2015 so I feel a little guilty about only ranting on it now — but it continues to get traffic and is quite wrong-headed. In any case, the…Asynchronous4 min readAsynchronous4 min read
May 16, 2022Ben Thompson interviews Shishir Mehrotra of Coda — I have ThoughtsBen Thompson had a great interview (paywall) with Shishir Mehrotra, former VP of YouTube and current CEO at Coda. It touched on a bunch of topics that are near and dear to my heart (bundling, universal documents, Microsoft Office) and I had to add some commentary. I’ll try to do…4 min read4 min read
Apr 29, 2022Where Does Bloat Come From?Steven Sinofsky has another deeply researched post about the history of UI complexity and bloat in the Microsoft Office applications. His post provides the background behind the decision to radically rework the Office UI with “the ribbon” (and lots of other related changes) in Office 2007. …Microsoft Office9 min readMicrosoft Office9 min read
