Joe Wilcox on Microsoft Monitor:
I believe one reason for the effectiveness of the Dell and standard Media Center interfaces is the less-is-more approach. The interfaces are uncluttered and expose consumers to a confined set of functions, unencumbered of unnecessary features.
One of my ownership areas is the Settings experience in the next version of Media Center and we are working very hard to insure that less-is-more but it certainly isn’t easy.
Interested in HDTV? I’ve poured over a lot of material recently and here are my three favorite links.
PC World’s HDTV Answer Guide is a good two page article to get you up to speed on HDTV. CNET has a good glossary and of course you could spend hours on AVS Forums.
The other day I pointed to Michael Creasy’s blog and then today I actually met him but I didn’t put two and two together until just now.
Turns out I should have met him prior to today because I had a meeting today that would have benefited from meeting him prior to the meeting. Oh well. I’m learning lots.
I found another Media Center blog. Michael Creasy is a software test engineer and works in the same division as I do. If you’re curious about developing for the Media Center you should subscribe to him.
This blogger likes the Windows Media Center:
Overall it is extremely easy to use and easy on the eyes!
New Windows Media Center form factors featured on Engadget:
Today I spent two hours attending a usability study. The lab was cool with lots of monitors and the one way mirror. It was fascinating to watch someone trying to use our product. I actually learned about a few features that the participant discovered in only two hours that I hadn’t yet discovered in four weeks. I also watched them experience, first hand, some of the problems with our product.
If you’re in Seattle and want some free software (worth up to $500 depending on what you pick) and want to try unreleased beta software the public hasn’t seen just sign up at the usability site.
Follow the Windows Media Center beta setup guy around the world with his new blog. I think this is the only Media Center blog? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Chris Pratley on my life: Starting out as a Program Manager
About 4 weeks into the job, you start to feel strange. People keep asking you to decide things you don’t know anything about, as if you’re some kind of expert. You find yourself going to your peers for help more often than you feel comfortable with. You start to wonder if you can actually do this. You start to tank.
This is my fourth week on the job as a new program manager straight out of university/college.
It’s been an interesting first couple weeks. The biggest barrier has been that my manager was extremely busy my first two weeks here and then subsequently got very sick. I didn’t see much of her, was given ownership of two areas, given minimal direction, no training (at Microsoft it is all trial by fire) and I guess I’m expected to produce something. So I started off by scheduling one on one’s with a lot of the leads who could give me an idea of how things worked and then I jumped in and started schedulig meetings to pull people together to figure out what needed to be done (a re-org) and then how it should be done and now we’re doing some preliminary work before getting down to a re-design. We’ll also need approval before we commit significant resources to this re-design which will be hard to get.
And yes, I’m so dumb. Every meeting I go to is way over my head. Even though our product is young there is so much history I don’t have an appreciation for and there is always a a sea of acronyms: SPDIF, AC3, DVI, 720p, 1020i, ZBB, BVT, IDX, LRPC…
To say that new PM hires need to be able to deal with ambiguity is an understatement.
Anyhow, time to get to work, thanks Chris for feeling me in on what my next eleven months will look like. Hopefully I can navigate around the pitfalls.
(Now that HR has a blog, NEO (New Employee Orientation) should get a blog and link to Chris’s article).