The title is a bit misleading as I have been in role for close to two years,
but Windows Phone has been in market for a year. During the course of the
past year, I learned quite a few things, and have been asked a number of
questions from the community. I wanted to take this time to share some of
those learnings, and answer a variant of the most common question I get (both
internally and externally): “how are you guys doing this?”
Upon starting in role, the person who recruited me for the position (Charlie
Kindel) walked me through what he calls the 5Ps. This served as a very
useful framework for thinking through how our team was going to tackle the
very real problem of being in last place for developer ecosystems, and
building excitement and driving recruitment for a pre-released mobile OS.
When we first met as a team, we sought to lay out what we though were the ... (more)
So I’m sick. Sick and travel are never fun. Recycled air on the plane
is usually the culprit. Sick sucks. In particular, it sucks when you are
out of your element. Travelling in the US usually affords you the ability
to walk into any familiar looking pharmacy and choose the appropriate cold
medicine from the dizzying array of choices.
International travel comes with its challenges, but most of my travel for the
last few years has been to familiar western culture countries. When you get
sick, you can at least understand some of what you are seeing in the store.
Identifying... (more)
This is a video thank you card to the men and women who work at Easton
Bell. My goal is to land this in front of Easton Bell President, Chris
Zimmerman (I think I figured out his email). I’m using all the tricks in
my bag. The tweet went out this morning, some buddy mails, this blog post,
some spelunking through LinkedIn, etc.
I know I have next to no talent in movie making or editing. I used my Flip
HD and personal laptop on this project, working in close partnership with my
companion – my beautiful 6 year old daughter. She had a great time with
the filming and the editing... (more)
Brandon Watson's "Many Niches" Blog
There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about the Azure Services
Platform. Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new
platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if
not somewhat rambling. There will be no shortage of guessing as to what
Microsoft is “really up to” with our development efforts.
I wanted to take a crack at that one, but from a completely different
perspective. I want to frame the discussion centered on the motivations of
the platform providers, and let that be a guide to understa... (more)
It looks like I will be speaking at the Structure09 event on June 25th in San
Francisco. I was invited to join a panel on cloud computing, and am honored
to have the opportunity to share the stage with many industry heavy
weights. Quite frankly, I’m not sure I measure up to the panel, but the
team over at GigaOm have faith in me.
If you haven’t already registered, they gave me a discount code for anyone
who reads this blog or follows me on Twitter. It should be a really good
event. They had their inaugural event last year, and I’m certain this one
will be even better. Here’... (more)
Brandon Watson is Director for Windows Phone 7. He specifically focuses on developers and the developer platform. He rejoined Microsoft in 2008 after nearly a decade on Wall Street and running successful start-ups. He has both an engineering degree and an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MBA from The Wharton School of Business, and blogs at 
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