My email to Bill Gates

I love working at Microsoft. And that's not as sickly sweet as it sounds, it really is a fun place to work. There's always interesting stuff going on and lots of incredibly clever people around. Another cool thing is that I work for the richest man in the world and, occasionally, I get the chance to "interact" with him in some way.

So a few weeks ago I decided to send him an email - just from me, to him. Of course he must get thousands of emails a day from all sorts of people - his email is widely known outside of Microsoft - so I wasn't that hopeful of a quick response. What was I emailing him about? Well, I wanted him to sign some stuff that we could give away at the Windows Vista and Microsoft Office launch events.

I'm pleased to say I got a response almost straight away and, to cut a long story short, we now have some signed merchandise to give away: A Windows Vista t-shirt signed by Bill Gates, two Windows Vista magazines signed by Bill, and also (an incredible coup) a t-shirt signed by Bill as well as Jim Allchin and a number of members of the core Windows Vista product team ie the people responsible for the development of Windows Vista.

I wanted to make people aware of this and to let you know that we're planning to give these away at some point during the run of the online launch ie by Feb 19th (online launch runs from Jan 19th to Feb 19th). More details later but I wanted tell you all about this as I think it's pretty cool generally :-)

Oh and this is just for us developer folks in the UK of course.