four years!

I have now been with MacBU, and Microsoft, for four years. I never intended to work for Microsoft. I got pinged from a recruiter who found my profile on the MacRumors forums, and I chatted with him because I think you should at least peek through the door when opportunity knocks. I approached the interview with more than a healthy dose of cynicism, and was completely won over by the end of the day. They offered me a job that evening, and I accepted the next morning.

In my four years with MacBU, I've had a hand in shipping a couple of Office 2004 service packs, Remote Desktop Connection v2, and Office 2008 and a couple of its service packs. I've conducted research on every application that we make. For the next version of Office, which you'll get in your hot little hands in time for the holiday season next year, one of my main focuses is Outlook:Mac. I've attended four Macworld Expos and talked at MWSF 2009 (and I'm talking at MWSF 2010 too: MacIT 821: Adminstrating Macs in Exchange 2007 and 2003), and three WWDCs, and I got to attend the keynote for each of those events.

I've also been blogging here pretty much since I started -- this blog's birthdate is 11 October 2005. This post is #514, which means that I've averaged 128.5 posts per year. In my first post, I said that my intent was "mostly to maintain notes on what I read that's relevant to my job". That quickly evolved into something more active, and more interactive: to lift the curtain and show you a bit of what goes on behind-the-scenes in making applications that millions of people use every day. My little corner of Microsoft, and my little corner of Mac development, is a fun one to work in, and I think that we've got some great stuff that can and should be shared.

A Microsoft tradition is to bring in one pound of candy for every year that you've been with the company. I've got a picture on my hard drive of one of our marketing guys holding a jar of 18 pounds of M&Ms. I did my own riff on it, and spent a fair portion of yesterday afternoon baking up four kinds of cookie: chocolate chip, chocolate and peanut butter, spicy oatmeal, and banana. So the Outlook, PowerPoint, and Core SVC teams today should get a lot done today with all of that sugar coursing through their bloodstream!

So what do the next four years have in store? Only time will tell. :)