Notes from Redmond

Monday is Microsoft day.  Off to Redmond where 35,000 of Microsoft’s 75,000 employees work. Its about half an hours drive from Seattle, across Lake Washington where the road seems very near to the water!  Breakfast here was good – MS eggs are very compatible with their bacon but I can’t get to appreciate the placement of savoury and fruit plus sweet pastry on the same plate.  And why can’t Americans supply ordinary tea? 

 As I found out much later during a shuttle ride to see the Microsoft store, there are over 100 buildings in the area that the shuttle company (driving Prius cars and other vans) ferry people around to with nothing more than a call on 39000.  The driver showed me a huge hole in the ground that is intended for 5000 cars to be parked under what is to become the new headquarters building apparently.  Yahoo are also moving here but frankly, I don’t see where they would go! Its just an incredibly large beast of a setup!  The shop was very good value mind you – MS employees can get things like Halo 3 for 25 dollars and all manner of hardware, software and everything you can imagine with MS written on it for a reasonable price.

I’m jolly pleased to be here but was made to think by a comment from one of my favourite colleagues, Chris yesterday.  She said that she was not coming to the trip because she didn’t think that any supplier deserved a whole day of her time.  Me?  Well, I’m in it for the experience and the networking – plus the chance to visit the MS shop and get a copy of Halo 3 at half price!

The lecture theatre is very nice with powerpoints, network sockets and wifi all present.

Well, we started with Anthony Salcito who introduced MSs vision to align the mission with users’ needs. Its no longer about technology but about people and improvement.

Ralph Young , vp for global public sector.  MS has chaged its mission to helping people achieve their potential.  It has “changed the dial” from microsoft drive-by licensing experience to see how the company can learn about helping people work and play together.  Education is MSs biggest business with 23 percent of software leaving the doors going there. As part of his presentation, he put up a slide that showed how much money MS employees had given to external companies.  There was something odd about this – my employer had no idea who I give my tithe or other giving to – and neither should it know or tell anyone imo.

Next up, Anoop Gupta – another education VP who was once technical adviser to Bill himself.  Hey – each speaker so far has spoken without notes and each mentions Bill – there is obviously a rigorous presentation methodology here …  He went way over time – and over my head!

Break – microsoft cake, yogurt and lots of it plus free coke etc blah  …

And next, Olaf Hubel and the collaborative campus with live demo… 

Olaf went through to complete toolset of MS web 2.0 type technologies and how they might work within an organisations governance framework inside and outside a University – including skydrive.  Look forward to the demo now …

First, Walter Hard speaks about Windows Live @ edu  <—- looks interesting, we’re going through the objections of outsourcing a major app like this …  in use by 6 million students in 35 countries. Looks like a combination of facebook and MSN live – apps and widgets can be inported to create a rich info page for students etc.

I think that what I really like is the orange background on the slides, lol!

Along comes Eric Gilmore, senior product manager for office live – www.officelive.com to give a demo.

The uniform is definitely open neck shirt, no tie and a jacket.  Phew, I dressed okay, lol!

Okay, here’s the demo being given now…  shareview – codename tahiti – ooooo! A good demo of collaboration bringing lots of collab tools together including voice etc.  Dunno why they insist on sticking to using the term office – students don’t work in an office. And I’d say that you really need to be familiar with the individual applications before you would dare to jump into the combination scenario.

Back to Olaf and his talk about integrating non-MS environments with sharepoint …

Unified communications – Olaf has presence awareness wherever he is now – phone and outlook amend his presence status.

He showed the MS roundtable camera …

Then collaboration and the full sharepoint suite – more than you get with the free version of course. One bit I liked was the slide share thing that unpacks slides of you and your colleagues then allows you to pick and choose  and updates the list etc.  All workflow managed of course.  Groove client allows external people to collaborate with docs within your security structure.  Demo of workflow generally within sharepoint and office apps.  “We really do support all the different browsers”.  Right. Comprehensive search index facility including ability to integrate pdf filters etc. and a what did you mean functionality – whatever that means!  Social ranking methods included.

And so to lunch – no way, can’t eat any more.

Daniel Rasmus – future guy. .. What are the things we could not possibly predict over the next 10 years and what are our options for dealing with them?

Battery going – grrrr … I wonder if anyone here will have a mac power lead? 

4×4 grid with middle line from centralised top down at the top to decentralised at the bottom.  Bordered local on left to borderless international on the right.  top right is proud tower, bottom right is freelance planet (as in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind), bottom left is frontier friction and top left continental drift.

Why do we give an employee a pc?  We don’t by them cars or bicycles?  Trends do not point toward destructive events. One world, always on, transparent, evolving workforce. Babybomers about to retire, gen x’ers looking at 19 jobs and world population falling. The digital generation mixes it all up and blurrs all the lines. Lack of corporate trust and personal success focus only.  Internet trust more than normal social trust. They don’t want to be told how, just what.  When they come, the bring their network with them – and they chat!  No boundaries. 

He has formed an information worker board of the future. Open learning environment not constrained to a classroom. Parents in the classroom and helping educaoters to learn too via reciprocal mentoring so that the kids can see the teachers learning too. Learning style alignment with tools and people.

Rethinking the school year and staying connected to learning. Couple of images of the desktop of the future for teacher and student - indicating status and activity.

The task is not what have we not seen – but what have we not though of about what is here now?

Now, Patric Heversi regarding infrastructure platforms (oh no, what a contrast of topics, lol). Server cores getting better blah blah, more security etc, easier upgrades …

Behrooz Chitsaz on Research and Innovation.  Put off by his first slide that was aimed at showing the new types of technology available but showed an old xbox and some fairly out of date phones. Check out http://research.microsoft.com for more info.

Lots of research ideas but nothing radical mentioned. They are working on indexing video and voice plus still feel that tablet PCs are the thing of the future.  No mention of table computers oddly – and there’s a whole lot more on offer in some of the older TED talks (www.ted.com)  He thought that if cost profiles continued to fall, it would soon be cheaper to buy lcd tvs than whiteboards …

Dr Jim Ptaszynski has a name stranger than mine and told us how Halo had taught him to be a better teacher.

His talk began with a Halo 3 trailer with the words “You are all vermin …” coming from the mouth of a slaying monster.  Ah, I thought, at last we’ve gotten honest with eachother after all!  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  Shouldn’t grumble – if you come to MS headquarters, what do you expect from them apart from the PR machine in overdrive?

Anyway, his main point was that 3000 hours of gameplay had been analyzed to find the “golden mean of fun” within the game and make it bigger than any box office release on its first day or even week.  Why aren’t we finding the golden mean of learning with as much zeal?  Well, I’m suggesting that most lecturers I know don’t have multi-million dollar budgets and 3000 hours to user test their learning materials – but I get his point.

He referred to Derk Bek’s book Our Underachieving Colleges and the fact that there was no incentive to achieve built into the system. Today’s students have changed the way they learn but teaching has remained largely the same.  He ended as we’d begun fwith a reference to the fact that “we’ve changed and we deeply want a relationship with you”.  Some resources from him:

http://microsoft.com/higher_education

http://innovateonline.info

http://microsoft.com/education/hec

Below are some spare pics including Microsoft tree – note the special soil block your garden must be made of to run it – and other pics …

 

 

 

Slipperless in Seattle

Well, it’s a stupid title – but its true – I had my slippers all out ready to travel but then forget to pack them and I’m already missing them!

Now, this is going to be a combination of work and non-work info as I’m attending the Educause 2007 conference in Seattle from Wednesday through Friday (see how I’m learning the language?!) but have Sunday and Tuesday to myself while visiting Microsoft’s head quarters on Monday.

Okay then, since I last had enough sleep (seem to have missed a night somewhere), I’ve experienced several personal firsts.  First time in Seattle, first time trying out Vista – and it’s on a mac (which I haven’t tried for 10 years) – and today was my first try of an American super Church!

Well, I’ll begin with a little about my journey.  Having used my mac to watch 5 episodes of 24 while travelling, I had my first experience of Vista…  Put the DVD in and it moaned about codec drivers or something and just wouldn’t work – this is s fresh install of it.  So I turned to Mac OSX and well, it just played.  Wish I’d brought a mouse though as the Macs only have one mouse key on the keyboard.  The plane ride was okay but sitting for 9.5 hours in one place next to a lady who really wasn’t in the mind of the seat designer, isn’t my idea of relaxation.  The lady was very friendly and she told me about her trip to Scotland and how nice people were.  She feared that I would definitely find American people unfriendly in comparison with the Brits.  But the entertainment system was okay – watched 4 films – the latest Die Hard (well, what can I say – as expected), a forgettable film about somebody building an ark (okay, single acts of random kindness are good things), sunshine (rubbish – seriously, from a sci-fi fan, don’t bother), and Ocean’s 13 (felt like I’d seen it before).

So, way too much TV, way too little sleep and a breakfast that almost killed me – when did “egg and bacon” become a large slab of steak with several days efforts from a chicken piled on top of a huge mound of fried somethings?  And it costs so much less than in the UK.

Okay, after breakfast, I managed to drag my stuffed body to Mars Hill (www.marshillchurch.org).  I’d been thinking of where I should go on Sunday morning but the choice seemed endless.  A friend recommended Mars Hill, and I’d read about it because the Pastor (Mark Driscoll) has his fans and his fervent critics.  I was warned that I may not like the music   Well, here’s my experience of it…

The Church meets on several campuses that all take relays from the main one (the one I went to) and then have local elements.  There are 5 services per day that I was told all have the same sermon but a progressively livelier band!

The Ballard campus (main or “equipping”) venue is a little like a medium sized conference venue.  It has a main hall with seating for what I’d say is around 500 poss more – with lots of reception desks, ante-rooms, foyer facilities etc.  The main hall had a stage up front and two large projection screens either side and several large plasma displays all around the hall – each displaying the activity on the front stage.  The ceiling was black and the lights dimmed and rose according to what was happening.  The lights on the side walls also changed colours – blue, red etc to change the ambience occasionally. It was all controlled by a central mixing desk and people would occasionally pass with cameras – I presume in order to get different shots – as the sermons are systematically placed on the Internet.

Anyway, to the service itself…   It kind of just began – I say “kind of” because far from everybody was seated when the person at the front started speaking and saying why we all come together. In fact, people passed my seat throughout the service and returned with cups of drink from the excellently serviced drinks areas that I found afterwards!  There were two songs to begin with – all heavily accompanied by electric guitar and drums – but more on that later…

The preaching was good and lasted for about an hour all in all.  Pastor Driscoll appears to be doing a series on “The Rebel and …” which this week was looking at Philippians 4 v 12-17 and focused on our reactions to suffering, personal and in general.  It was the kind of thing that Wyn Hughes (my own Pastor at Heath www.heath-church.org) might have preached himself!  Very good and useful sermon.  I may have missed it – but it didn’t appear to distinguish between the sufferings that may come about as a result of being a Christian specifically (i.e. “take up thy cross and follow me”) as opposed to the more general category experienced by all.

Near the beginning, there was some video footage of this week’s news bulletins as the Pastor felt that many of us simply avoid the suffering that takes place in the world and wrap ourselves in our little cocoons of joy.  It also ended with a video (I presume made in-house) about Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871) who wrote “Just as I am” while suffering great pain and bed bound for many years.

We then went on to “sing” that great hymn to close.  I say “sing” but here’s where I get off the Mars Hill bus because I was so sincerely disappointed at this.  Some may find it odd that “I” say this – but I’ve nothing intrinsically against electric guitars and drums per-se.  However, my problem is that one could hardly hear one’s self sing let alone the other people in the hall.  The whole thing was dominated by very loud banging, crashing and twanging.  The musicians and the lead vocal guy were really talented but it was just so out of place in my opinion.  Don’t get me wrong – an organ can do just as much damage and often does (oops, did I really say that?!) – but this didn’t give the people a chance.  Again, it’s honestly not that I have anything against that type of music – it’s just that it was totally out of place.  This was a group of people gathered together for worship but the only thing that could be heard was the noise being made by the few people on the stage.  I just think that they are missing so much by doing it this way.  If it was quieter it might have been better – but I doubt you can do what that chap did with a drum kit in a quiet manner.

Communion was available during this singing and people were randomly wondering to the front to get their stuff and return to their seats to take it at their own pace (or so I found out afterwards). 

Frankly, it didn’t seem too friendly I’m afraid to say.  I would have loved to have gone to somebody’s house for lunch and to have experienced a bit of real America.  But, in spite of writing to the Church’s email address a couple of weeks before coming – and in spite of approaching 11 people to speak to them and say Hi myself, nobody returned my email and nobody engaged me in conversation or tried to find anything out about me beyond answering my questions regarding where to sit etc.  I sat by 3 young people who I was delighted to chat to for a few minutes after the service, but that was it.  I approached several others after the service but again, factual responses with no desire to find out anything about me or whether I was hungry!

(the sermon as preached in the evening is available to watch / download etchere: http://www.marshillchurch.org/sermonseries/philippians/week_03.aspx )

My afternoon was spent wondering around down town Seattle which was fun if a bit unusual for me on a Sunday!  I wanted to see if I could find my rendezvous for the bus that is taking me to tomorrow’s meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.  I spent a good while in the Seattle Public Library which is excellent – and I have a meeting there planned for Tuesday to find out about their use of RFID.  I took the liberty of updating my facebook status on their public PCs but was curious to note that while they are password protected, you could approach a desk and pick up a piece of paper with the day’s password on it! 

I was also  surprised to note that there were so many people using the PCs but when I asked two different members of staff about whether there was any analysis of the type of people that use the equipment, I drew a monosyllabic blank.

Maybe it’s me or maybe the lady on the plane was right.  Americans are normally completely besottingly friendly and polite when providing you with a service but not necessarily always so when not serving you – which is maybe the other way around to the UK!  Who knows?

In fact, I have had several good chats today with non service providers!  There were a couple of guys in the library that I asked why they used it.  They told me that they came with their laptops to rip music! Then there was the chap who complimented me on my The North Face fleece, saying that they are very popular in Seattle.

Everyone says that you have to go to the market by the bay.  I did have a wonder down there but it was pretty much like Cardiff market – which I suppose is fairly unusual for the US so fair enough.

This evening I met up with some really lovely UCISA colleagues.  Funny how facebook meant that certain people I had never really spoken to before were aware of my house move and and what the location of the new one looked like!

Speaking of which, its nearly midnight here so must be around 8am at home.  Think I’ll phone wifey and the kids to wish them a good day …