About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite
where I met Gary Flake. I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece
on Gary a few years back, but didn’t have any idea who he was when I was
introduced to him at the offsite. As one of Microsoft’s Technical
Fellows, he’s basically one of the 20 or so smartest engineers in the
company. Spending time with a guy like that is a treat, and this guy thinks
about stuff that gets me excited. Data and systems.
It’s a good thing Gary is so good at his job, because when he gave me the
initial pitch for Pivot I thought it sounded about as interesting as a new
sorting algorithm [NOTE: the downloads are restricted to token holders, so if
you are interested in getting Pivot, hit me up on Twitter and I... (more)
Mini-MSFT is back, with a post about Microsoft turning The Corner. It’s
interesting to contrast his point of view with that of MG Siegler over at
ParisLemon. Given my own perception of Valley bias on the part of Siegler
(he is one of the new voices of TechCrunch after all), it’s great to see
that we’re making progress which is being met with receptivity and not
suspicion. Further, ev... (more)
Azure Cloud on Ulitzer
About one year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. With the start of our new
fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the
technical marketing for our developer platform product management team.
It’s been quite a journey, and I have been able to expand the scope of the... (more)
About 3 weeks ago, I wrote this article about the Kindle, and mentioned how I
thought that for various reasons attached to the Kindle, I was actually going
to be reading more.
Shortly thereafter, I got a ping on Facebook from someone I didn’t know.
His name is Brad Stone, and he identified himself as a journalist and he had
some questions about my blog post. I rang him up, and we spoke ... (more)
I ran into an interesting bug this past wee when trying to install the beta 2
build of Visual Studio 2010. I tried both the web bootstrap install and the
full ISO download. I also tried the Ultimate version as well as
Professional. Nothing seemed to be working.
It turns out that my machine configuration was the problem. I am running a
MacBook Pro for my personal dev machine, mostly so... (more)
Brandon Watson is Director of Microsoft's Azure Services Platform Ecosystem. 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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Data Recovery Services
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