My son was on a riot act this weekend so I shouted, "Serenity Now!" to my wife.  Over the past month, I discovered the little-known TV program, "FireFly" in limited reruns on SciFi Channel.  Why limited?  Because it appears Fox did such a poor job of marketing the programming and meddling in the creative aspects that the show was cancelled after only a few episodes.  (Note to self: Don't ever watch SciFi ever on Fox- remember Space: Above and Beyond? The suits don't get it). Now I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around, starting with naming a program "FireFly"...

Anyway, I initially hated the "country/western" aspects of the show but gave it two episodes.  I had never heard of this Joss Whedon creator/writer/director/executive producer guy- I'm not a "Buffy" or "Angel" fan.  What I did find was an amazingly well scripted show with edge, humor, culture, and of course, tech. 

Since the cancellation of the TV show and it's resurgence on SciFi, last week, "Serenity"- a major motion picture was released based on the TV show. My impression - Whedon is the next George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry rolled into one.  With Star Trek so whitewashed and formulaic it is going to have to be re-"envisioned", and Star Wars suffering from bad acting and even worse scriptwriting, Whedon slips into an opening here.  And with a 4.25 out of 5 star average critic's rating, let's hope the audience shows up for it.  I had a kick in the pants time and will go see it again- in the theater.  High praise for any movie.

And what did my wife say?  She "really really enjoyed it".

Tonight (or appropriately enough in Japan, er tonight...er make that tomorrow), Microsoft and Intel announced their plans to support HD DVD and join the DVD Forum’s HD DVD Group. 

Both companies have been undergoing extensive reviews of the competing formats, and have determined that only the HD DVD format delivers unique and crucial advantages, including PC and connected device interoperability, superior capacity, and an easy, affordable transition to HD for consumers.  The companies believe HD DVD will bring more high definition video to the consumer faster, with the potential for more affordable hardware and more interactive features than other HD optical formats.

Microsoft and Intel rationalized this by noting the following strengths of the HD DVD format:

For those of us who suffered through the DVD format wars and cringing at the thought of doing the same with High Definition DVD (HD-DVD), this news may be enough to bring all the players together and unify a format before we get to Betamax vs. VHS.  Here's to wishful thinking ;)  What do you think?

I can't say what it is yet, but "it" will be made at an unusual 9pm tonight.  Between the Palm partnership with Treo running Windows Mobile announced today and this 9pm announcement, the shock and awe is starting... more later but I think Scoble will be pleased.

Let me start by saying I love the industrial design behind the ipod nano.  I just bought one and am eagerly awaiting its arrival so I can run it through its paces.  But now I'm learning that there may be significant concerns regarding the engineering and ease with which it can be damaged. The Register, MacIntouch, Apple's Support Groups (a 291 thread discussion), and a new site called "FlawedMusicPlayer.com" (formerly ipodnanoflaw.com) all report on failures, the latter of which is posting pictures of others' broken ipod Nano's.

I won't pass judgement, particularly until I see it myself, but it sounds like there's a lot of unhappy folks out there and some frustrated Apple store employees dealing with the returns. Here's to hoping I'm not one of them when my Nano arrives next week.

Shawn (a fellow PM in Windows Incubation) takes Mini-MSFT to task and says it's time for the armchair quarterbacking to stop. He also calls me "the PM that can get anything done" That's high praise coming from Shawn- I'm still learning, and you're right, we have an amazing team.

Side note: On Monday a small group of us are filming an interview for Channel 9 with Robert Scoble talking about Windows Sidebar, Windows Gadgets for the desktop and the Web.  If you have questions you'd like to see us answer, feel free to post them here.  We may not get to all of them, but this is the first of what I expect will be a series of videos.

I don't normally talk much about internal happenings but there's been lots of chatter following the company meeting yesterday.  Even Mini-MSFT (who doesn't know what an employment agreement looks like) was happy. Sanaz was wowed. Scoble was impressed. Even the unauthorized Microsoft blog nets out positively.  

To put things in perspective, I'm no longer a newbie but recognizing I'm becoming a seasoned veteran at Microsoft (who joined post-"stock payout" by about 12 months).  This was my ninth company meeting. I'm working on my fourth OS launch and have two "Ship It" awards filled with over a dozen products and technologies I've played a part in shipping.  It could be easy to become jaded.  I prefer the term "pragmatic" in my approach as I've tasted kool aid and briny water alike over the years.

Yesterday, Bob, the manager at my local grocery store saw my Microsoft hat and asked me,

"So, you work for Microsoft?"
"Yes" I replied"
"I read this morning you're having some trouble?" he said
"We're staying the course" I responded and smiled.

You know what?  I was wrong.  We aren't staying the course. The course is different, the "ship" is finalizing a major refit. Two years we stood-down to re-engineer our security processes. A year ago, we did the same for engineering the OS.  This is responsible engineering, which takes more time but puts a premium on the customer experience.  The recent reorg further clarifies who is in command, and the controls they will use to speed up the pipeline in a responsible way.

Further cementing this, after reading the surprisingly frank article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal detailing what went wrong with the first incarnation of Longhorn, the thought kept popping into my head, "The first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem and the will to do something about it."

So what are my thoughts after the company meeting? 

Two words: Hopeful and focused. Hopeful that others will recognize the changes that have been made to the customers' long-term benefit, and hopeful that the recent reorg will focus efforts on the challenges both near and long-term.  What I've seen is encouraging so far and our team has managed to stay largely focused on our charter.

What's more, the "shock and awe" of products as Scoble describes it is just starting (as early as Monday ;)). And when you consider what's coming down the pike, the largest and most focused set of releases - from Xbox 360, to Windows Vista, to Office, to Visual Studio, to our server, small business, and enterprise solutions and more are all coming.  Microsoft has never had a compelling product pipeline like this before.

A few weeks ago, another article, this time in The New York Times (08/28/05), noted:

"On Wall Street, however, a recent tally by Thomson Financial showed that of 34 security analysts following the company, 30 recommended that Microsoft be bought. Only one advised selling ... [T]he dominant sentiment on Wall Street is upbeat, Mr. Friedman said. "The word people are using with Microsoft right now," he said, "is 'renaissance.' "

I wondered the first time I read this article whether Mr. Friedman knew something I did not.  After seeing it lined up at the company meeting, it's starting to make sense.  I just hope that for others like Bob, they don't have to wait too long to see it too.

Vern Gill sent me mail that he's working to organize a Geek Dinner/Drinks in the Phoenix, Arizona area.  Anyone who might be interested, please drop a comment here and Vern will get in touch with you. 

If others are interested in setting up Geek Dinners in your own areas, plinease drop a comment as well and we'll match you up. 

From LonghornBlogs.com:

Tom's Hardware Guide talks with ATI's vice president of their software divsision Ben Bar-Haim about "Vista-Ready" Drivers and discusses their stability.

Vista graphics drivers are programmed for a new driver model currently named LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model), although the "Longhorn" part is subject to change. According to Bar-Haim, the "user mode-based" drivers depart from Windows XP's "kernel mode-based" model, and are thus unable to crash the operating system: "Microsoft had concerns about the stability of drivers in XP when they noticed an unreasonable high amount of XP crashes due to device drivers. With LDDM, we can run the driver engine for months without crashing," he said.

This is definately another plus on Microsoft's part for Windows Vista. I'd like to install drivers without crashes. I want to be able to install an incorrect driver and have it just tell me that the device driver won't work with the specified device instead of possibly crashing the entire operating system. The drivers ATI has released for Windows Vista Beta 1 have proven strong and reliable as I tested Beta 1. I have yet to load the ATI drivers in Build 5219 as of yet.

Lou, Shawn, and Steve from our team had an opportunity a few days ago to meet Kathy Sierra and Burt Bates of, "Creating Passionate Users". They were on campus and the guys cold-emailed them and asked for a meeting.  What they got what something so much more. In Kathy's words:

I spent yesterday at Microsoft. And yes, it was on a "passionate users" mission -- something even my teenage daughter found hilarious given the Microsoft we all know and love to hate. But the day was a string of surprises and challenged assumptions... ending with meeting some amazing MS guys including Furrygoat's Steve Mafosky, Shawn Morrissey, and Lou (whose-last-name-I-forgot)).

...It's so tempting to say that anyone who really cares that much about users ought to get the hell out of the big company. I know, having done my time at Sun. But I'd forgotten how to see Microsoft as something other than a Big Company. I'd forgotten (or never recognized) that it's a collection of individual people, and no matter how entrenched the company's views, policies, practices, values, bureaucracy, etc. are, there are motivated, smart, caring, creative people who work there.

It's guys like Lou, Shawn and Steve that are the reason I joined this team.  I wish I could have been there. In "traditional" models of user-interaction, some development teams abhor the idea of meeting customers, of "hanging out" at a booth at a trade show.  One of my most memorable moments years ago was helping a wonderful woman from the US Postal Service who attended the old PC Expo show with her PC. She had just bought a Windows XP PC (which had just shipped) and had dozens of questions. She stuck around for 40 minutes asking questions, deferring to others with their own questions and coming back.  She came back the next day with more questions.  At the end, she said to me, "Thank you so much. I never knew Microsoft could be so helpful".  She's one of the customers that I carry with me day to day - she needs to feel that what we're doing "kicks ass". (Then there's the flight attendant in 1999 who sat in the aisle during final approach asking me questions until we're 20 seconds from landing, but that's another story.)

She wasn't just referring to me.  I was representing all of Microsoft.  So often folks forget that.  As Kathy points out, I too have been accused of "burning bridges" with coworkers on old teams who adopted "can't do" attitudes, avoided talking to the customer, or thought that "blogging" is such a geeky and wasteful thing.  Nothing upsets me more than taking the stance that they're too important or already know the customer based on just primary and secondary research. Understanding the customer is a daily event.

While Kathy says to "Subvert from within", I prefer to think of this as "raising up" or "raising the bar" from within.  Sometimes you have to shine a light into the dark corners- the people you find there won't like it, but it affects change.

A new Version 3.0 of  mceWeather is available for FREE at http://www.cbuenger.com.

A few folks have commented here and on the Microsoft Gadgets site that I should take a moment to acknowledge other players in the mini-app space who were "there first". Heated conversations have been seen between extreme fans of different platforms claiming they were there first or accusations of copying.  I'm not going to get into revisionist history.  But what I will say is this:

Stardock, Konfabulator, and Apple all have their own takes on mini-applications, as do many others. Each has it's strengths. Whether they're called "Widgets", "Gadgets", "Tiles", "Parts", or "Sprockets" doesn't matter.  Did anyone notice that the term "Dashboard" was first coined in MSN's interpretation of Sidebar back in 2001? It doesn't matter. Each has its own interpretation of the concept. No one platform will appeal to all, and every platform can be improved.

At the end of the day, we want to make great software that's useful and "sticky".  If you want to be a part of that, to have your feedback heard, to criticize or question design decisions- that's great!  Our model will involve working directly with the community in a more transparent way.  We won't be making decisions by committee, but we will be actively engaging you in the conversation if you want to be a part of it.  And that's my last comment on the topic. :)

(This post is dedicated to Thomas Hawk)

Tim M Moore, an enthusiast over at The Green Button posts a kit for adding HDTV/SDTV recording w/ closed-captioning off a whole slew of set-top boxes and serial control for DirecTV boxes.  For many, including the Motorola 6412, this appears to also support channel changing and recording via Firewire. Dual-tuner/dual-STB support also appears to be in there.

Note: This is an unofficial release and may void blah blah blah. Use at your own risk.  Requires an analog tuner be installed.

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=26&MessageID=104152&TopicPage=1

In the words of a friend, "This changes everything."  I agree.  This is great to see.

Matt Goyer posts details on how to get your Media Center application posted into Windows Marketplace and seen by millions of Windows users. As a bonus, it will also show up on C|Net's Download.com.

In order to help promote your great Media Center development work to consumers, the Media Center group at Microsoft is excited to announce that, starting today, you can upload your finished Media Center application to Windows Marketplace, a comprehensive, easy-to-use shopping and download site that helps Windows customers discover, experience, and purchase partner products and software.

After Microsoft has processed your application, your approved Media Center product will be available for download from CNET’s Download.com and Windows Marketplace - www.windowsmarketplace.com.

First, a sincere welcome to the Pro-Mac community.  I'll agree every OS has it's strengths and weaknesses.  Many a good idea has been interpreted by different groups and if you search through my posts, I think you'll come to find I'm not going to participate in "Which came first" discussions.  I'll read your posts- the good and the bad though- they're all appreciated as a part of the conversation provided they're constructive (criticism or kudos).  I also won't censor you here unless you're profane.  In the end, all of your comments will help us build a better product- pros and cons.

One important note about Windows Sidebar.  It's come to my attention that someone got a very early build of Windows Sidebar, stripped it out of Windows Vista, and may or may not be distributing it.  Windows Sidebar has not been officially released by Microsoft and I will not comment on it other than to say developers and end-users are strongly encouraged NOT to download and install any software that says it's from Microsoft and not from Microsoft servers.  It could be malware, a virus, or something else- you just don't know. 

As for why Windows Sidebar wasn't made available to developers as a part of the PDC build, sometimes development schedules don't line up exactly.  Windows Sidebar will be available around Windows Vista Beta 2 to testers/developers.  Trust me that you want to wait and start building for the platform at that time.

I hope that helps, I'm on vacation for a few days- in the meantime, I encourage you to submit your questions about Windows Sidebar here for inclusion in our FAQ and an upcoming interview with the team for Channel 9. 

For those who know me, I have a varied number of interests- having started at Microsoft in developer tools before transitioning to digital media platforms, and then consumer technologies in Windows.  About six months ago, I heard about a team that was working on adding "cool" new features into Windows Vista.  The team was hiring so I started kicking tires and today, I'm a Senior Program Manager on the team.

Things are crazy here at PDC but Bill Gates just demo'd what I've been working on most recently: Windows Sidebar.  It's back, but it never really went away, just out of the public view.  What's more is that it's just one of the things our team is working on -others to be announced later.  Given how busy we are here- I'm going to lift Steve "Furrygoat" Makofsky's most recent post.

Now that it's been revealed in the PDC Keynote, I can finally start to talk about one of the projects that our team has been working on. Yes, it's the Windows Sidebar.

So, what exactly are Gadgets? Offically, "Gadgets are a new category of mini-application for the Windows Desktop and the Web. Windows Sidebar is the container for Gadgets on the Windows desktop in Windows Vista. Web Gadgets can also be built for rich, dynamic sites like Start.com."

Unoffically? Well, I'll be posting a lot more on that in the coming weeks. :)

It's really a great feeling to finally see all of the blood, sweat and tears finally make the light of day. The team behind Windows Sidebar is really small, and I can easily say that it's been pretty inspiring to work with such a passionate group of people. Windows Sidebar will be available for developers 'around Beta 2', but in the mean time check out http://www.microsoftgadgets.com (it should be up today).

I've also set up a new "gadgets" category to talk about building Gadgets for the Windows Sidebar, so please feel free to send over any questions, thoughts, comments, etc and I'll see what I can do to either answer them here, or get them into the FAQ.

Finally, did you notice at the beginning of the post, I mentioned that Windows Sidebar was only one of the projects we're working on....... (more coming soon)....

Update: Shawn has posted on Windows Sidebar as well.

But Windows Sidebar is just a part of the story.  Gadgets are available for Web, Windows Desktop, and Devices.  No one else is doing that. Check out www.microsoftgadgets.com for the skinny on Gadgets- more details to come soon.

Update: Comments aren't working yet on www.MicrosoftGadgets.com

Joe Wilcox notes:

My wife's not much of a technobabe. She can use the Web and e-mail, but pretty much stops there. Oh, yeah, she listens to music on an iPod mini. So, she doesn't much tune into tech talk; those conversations she tunes out.

...I took her to see iPod nano last night, at Apple's mini store in downtown Bethesda, Md. My wife and daughter both gawked, while I showed just a ting more restraint. To say the device is small really doesn't describe the size. Best is to say that everything else is huge by comparison.

I think Joe's wife must be in the same circle as my wife.  My wife LOVES the Razr she asked for for her birthday.  My wife NEVER asks for any gadgetry for any event, nor does she generally use it.  Though she did love the Rio Carbon (RIP), she recently decided the Razr was her new technocraving. 

She has the Razr. The other day, I found my old Motorola StarTac from 1998 and put it alongside.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Which brings me to the iPod Nano.  I know this is going to be on her Christmas list (though she'll hate the lack of Yahoo Music support).  I'm looking forward to comparing the Nano to the Razr.

At that size, could an iPod Phone built and designed by Apple really be that far out of reach?

Creative- it's time to do something bold.

Geek Dinner for Media Center (and what I'm talking about tomorrow AM when my feature is announced) at:

Wilshire Grand Hotel (Bus Route 2 I believe)
Point Moorea Restaurant & Bar (reservation under "Alexander")
6:30PM Tuesday 9/13/2005

I have space booked for 10-15 people.  First round of drinks are on us. 
Please RSVP here if you're in so we know if we need more space.

Special prize for the geek with the loudest hawaiian shirt. ;) Come on, you know you have one- I'll be wearing mine!