What Comes Next

[Paul]

As most of you know, today is my last day as a fulltime employee at Microsoft. It’s been an exciting 16+ years and all I can say is that I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be in this industry and at Microsoft. What an incredible chance to work with such a great set of people. I was also very fortunate to be in an environment that allowed me to work on a team that was able to have such a positive and significant impact on the way people play and work with technology.
What’s truly amazing to me is that we are just at the beginning for what technology will be able to do. The next 50 years are going to be much more exciting than the last 50 (and that’s saying a lot!) when you consider the potential impact technology advances will have on people and businesses.
Lots of people have been asking me what comes next. In the long term, I can tell you honestly that I don’t know. While the term “retire” has been used to describe people at all stages of their lives as they leave a job, for a guy my age it’s a pretty strange term. I’m not exactly the golfing type. I am looking forward to spending time with my family and frankly getting some rest.
While I don’t know what I will be up to in the long term (although charity will be one key focus), I have a pretty good sense of what I will be doing in the near term, so I thought I would share what I think a typical day might look like.
It might go something like this:

• 7:00 AM: Breakfast with my sons. Ended up doing a product comparison review of the various cereals we had in our pantry. Sugar does beat the natural stuff and my suspicions about the impact of packaging on the post purchase experience were spot on. It turns out the box does matter.
• 7:40 AM: Kids off to school.
• 7:45 AM: Went to check email. Only two pieces.
• 7:46 AM: Checked network connection to see why I am not getting any email. Everything working perfectly.
• 8:00 AM: Went to clean up the playroom so that it’s organized for when the kids get home. Ended up building an application to sort the Legos using a SQL Server backend and a Windows Presentation Foundation front-end on Windows Vista. Can’t decide whether the primary index of the database should be color or size of the piece. While searching the web discovered that Lego means “I put together” in Latin.
• 9:30 AM: Spent 45 minutes looking around the house for the big refrigerator with the free soda just like Microsoft – was unable to find it.
• 10:15 AM: Worked on my Windows logo latch hook rug – another couple days and I’ll finish the red.
• 11:00 AM: Watched Rachel Ray – god is she engaging. Maybe she should do the launch of the next version of Windows.
• 11:30 AM: Checked mail again. No messages.
• 11:31 AM: Turned off Spam filter.
• 12:00 PM: Went out to lunch with my wife. Was surprised to see so many other people out for lunch during the week. I wonder if they have been buzzing around for all of these years that I have been in building 26.
• 1:30 PM: Went to check out the Apple store at University Village to see what all of the hype was about. Ended up demoing Windows Vista for all of the employees (and a few customers). All they could say was “Wow.” Ended up leading a group of them over to BestBuy to help them pick out new PCs with Windows Vista pre-loaded. Need to go to the Bellevue store tomorrow.
• 3:00 PM: Checked email. 150 unread messages. Unfortunately, 149 of them were spam.
• 3:10 PM: Turned Spam filter back on.
• 3:15 PM: Went to drive the afternoon carpool run. Spent 20 minutes waiting in line behind other parents whose kids weren’t even outside yet. Need to write paper about Next Generation Carpool Queuing solution (NGCQ) that integrates Windows Live Presence with the driveway scheduler. Must get appointment with school principal when it’s done.
• 4:00 PM: Home with the boys. Went to the playroom to help them build a train layout. Ended up doing interoperability test to study compatibility issues related to using Thomas trains on Brio track. Turns out while they work, the trains perform better on their native platform. Need to try Brio trains on Thomas track tomorrow.
• 4:30 PM: After a phone call with my Mom, I decided I needed to configure her account as a standard user for Windows Vista. This gives new meaning to “parental controls”, but a son has to do what a son has to do.
• 5:00 PM: Dinner with the family. After they finished asking who was this strange man sitting at the dinner table, we had a great conversation about the kids’ day. May have spent too much time asking them “how they would have done things better” and “what do they see as their key areas for growth.”
• 6:45 PM: Read kids a bedtime story. They seem to be recently interested in “chapter books.” I was amazed by how quickly they fell asleep when I read them one of my favorite classics, “The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability” by Rogers.
• 7:30 PM: Checked email. Again. No new email.
• 7:31 PM: Turned Spam filter off again.
• 8:00 PM: Went down to my music room to play my guitar. Dozed off on the couch.

Anyway, on a serious note, a few months ago, when I decided to start blogging, a lot of people thought I was crazy. It was certainly an experiment, but in the end it’s been very rewarding for me, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed it as well. I’m about to walk out the door, so clicking “post” on this blog will be my last official act as a Microsoft employee.
I love this company, and I have the utmost confidence that the great people here will continue to bring their creativity, passion, and drive to building world-class software that help our customers do amazing things.
See you on the Internet,
jim
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