Innovation and Recognition

Technology innovation with a view to enabling customer scenarios is what we predominantly do at Microsoft and in the Developer Division. I always say that we can be successful in the market and with our customers only as long as we provide the best value proposition for our customers. That means we need to continue being on the bleeding edge of innovation. The day we stop innovating and the day we stop providing a great value proposition to our customers is also the day that our customers will leave us.

Innovation is a critical component of everything that we do in my division. I am fortunate to have a team of very strong people who share the same passion as I do about innovation.

This week I was very pleased to see the C# team winning the Outstanding Technical Achievement award. This is part of an internal recognition program that we recently instituted where we wanted to recognize outstanding technical innovation and leadership on an annual basis. This particular award is given to a team which has provided an outstanding and innovative technical achievement that has transformed the world of software. The C# team has done some ground-breaking work that was a cornerstone for the success of .NET among our developer community. Seeing the team get recognized for their innovating work across all of Microsoft is both very nice and very humbling.

When it rains, it pours – in this case, it was a good one. The key technical architect for the original C# effort, Anders Hejlsberg, was recognized and listed on the eWeek’s list of Top 100 Most Influential People in IT last night. It is fantastic to see Anders getting this level of recognition in the industry for his invaluable contribution to programming languages during his career both at Microsoft and before. Even though these are two outstanding awards, they are not the only leaders in the team. Every one of my team member is focused on pushing the envelope for developer tools, designer tools and developer platform technologies, working with our customers and developer community to build the products you expect.

As innovation is a team focus, I am also counting on your help – your ongoing feedback to the technologies and products that we build is of paramount value to ensuring we build the right products and enable the right scenarios for you.

Namaste!