
Microsoft’s Effort to Build Apps and Reward Engineers - woan
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27novel.html?ref=technology
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sriramk
Thanks for posting this :). Earlier thread when my wife and I created the app
here -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173298>

This entire PR exercise has been fun. It went something like this

\- Pitch TC with a very standard email. I was up the previous night looking
through HN for advice on pitch emails. TC wrote a great post on us (it helped
that both Path and Instagram announced funding that day)

\- Pitch Techflash with the TC post. Todd Bishop is a great guy and he had
done an earlier article on an older app of mine so this was a nice tie-in.

\- Mail Anne Eisenberg of the NYT and point to both of the above. I had
interacted with Anne several years ago and dug out her email address. Anne is
just an amazing person and it has been great fun to work with her this past
few weeks. Anne also pulled in Microsoft PR who pulled in Brandon Watson who
run the show when it comes to Windows Phone development.

For both Aarthi and me, coming from a typical developer/engineer background,
this entire experience has been very educational.

Now I'm off to see how many hits I got from the NYT linking to bubblegum.me :)

~~~
awa
Brilliant and Congrats... I am going to try out the app today :)

~~~
arithmetic
Thanks! let us know if you have any feedback (support@bubblegum.me)

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BrandonWatson
I have to give props to Sriram...I usually don't get the NYTimes calling me
about being in a story. He sold them all on his own. Great personal effort on
his part.

~~~
sriramk
Thanks Brandon - we appreciate all the support from you guys :).

To be clear, Aarthi (arithmetic on HN) did more than half the work, both in
terms of code and in PR. It turns out that being married to someone who can
code circles around you has its benefits :).

Separately, I think that helped with some of the press - the fact that we were
a married couple (and her being a leading female coder/engineer in an industry
which doesn't have that many) added a human interest angle.

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drewda
In terms of Microsoft's external efforts to spur on WP7 development, I haven't
been as impressed. Maybe it's just that I'm bitter about sitting through an
evening's worth of presentations with a room full of iPhone developers at MS's
Mountain View campus and not being offered a free developer phone at the end
;-) But seriously, Google has done a lot of developer outreach to try to catch
up with Apple, yet I don't see MS doing much other than expecting us
developers upgrade to the latest Windows, buy ourselves a copy of Visual
Studio, find and purchase a WP7 handset, etc., etc.

~~~
BrandonWatson
I run developer mktg for phone. Sad to hear you think we aren't doing a good
job.

Handing out phones to everyone is a bad ROI. Are you building apps? If yes, we
have phones for people commited to building on the WP7 platform. Send me an
email at brwatson at Microsoft and we'll get you sorted.

Oh, and our tools for WP7 are free.

~~~
steverb
I suspect you may come to regret posting that.

~~~
BrandonWatson
Why?

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credo
I agree with one theme of the article. It is a good idea for Microsoft to
encourage its developers (and other employees) to write WP7 apps. Pizza
parties etc. are also good.

However, the article is misleading when it talks about "rule changes".

 _> >"We tend to have strict moonlighting rules," he said of the company."But
we’ve changed those rules so developers can do this in their spare time"_

 _> >MICROSOFT’S new rules fit into the broader rethinking of how large
companies manage research._

For most of the past decade, Microsoft had fairly liberal moonlighting rules.
You could start your own business and work on it as long as you didn't see a
conflict of interest with your work at Microsoft.

In the 90s, manager approval was required for moonlighting. For most or all of
the 00s, you didn't even need to inform your manager about moonlighting
(unless you saw a potential conflict of interests)

These rules aren't new (and have nothing to with WP7). In fact, many of the
people I know used these liberal moonlighting rules to write iPhone apps in
2008. Some of them are still at Microsoft and some of them quit Microsoft
after their iOS business did well.

~~~
BrandonWatson
Not true. We had to make changes to how IP was treated. Yes employees can work
on non-related-to-MSFT stuff, but profiting from apps would have had troubles
without changes to the policy. It was the collective work of a lot of people
associated with WP7 that made this happen.

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ThomPete
The main problem that Microsoft is facing is the same as they faced with
Silverlight.

Developers are only one part of the equation. It's the designers and
creative/visual developers that you need to make your platform really stand
out.

For what it's worth though I saw the Windows OS on WMC and it looked pretty
great especially for games. Although I am not sold on their basic GUI, but
time will tell.

I am not saying this to belittle the importance of developers but that is to
me rather obvious.

