Am I a Stopped Drain?

Ken Levy, the product planner/marketer, for my group blogged about a bunch of us joining the group. Mary Jo Foley (of Microsoft Watch fame) then wrote an article based on Ken's blog. This is a perfect example of what Paul Graham was talking about in his article on Corporate PR which I've linked to before. It's all just one big echo chamber. At least Ms. Foley demonstrates her integrity by clearly providing the provenance of her data.

Big Changes

Lately life has changed a lot. The first massive, huge, enormous, life altering change is that I'm now a daddy. More proof that there should be licenses or something required before becoming a parent. It's been several weeks since my daughter was born and life will, of course, never be like it was before but at least I can sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time. In case having a new child wasn't enough Marina and I bought a new house a few weeks ago. And, just to finish up the trifecta of stress, I quit BEA and went to work for Satan er I mean the Borg oops I mean the Dark Side, damn, no, I mean Microsoft. Let us hope the loving care I give to my daughter is enough to reclaim my immortal soul (again).

What I do for a living

I'm a technical director and individual contributor who focuses on issues such as:

  • Corporate technical strategy (e.g. what technologies should we be investing in and when?),
  • Cross company technical coordination (building consensus on the direction for our technical architecture and then herding the cats to make it happen),
  • Standards strategy (which standards do we create/adopt/oppose and when?) and
  • OSS strategy (how to best contribute to and take advantage of the resources on offer).

It's Official, I'm not a C Level Player

I got mentioned (alas my name was misspelled it's Yaron Goland not Yaron Golan) in Cringely's column this week. I read Cringely's column every week so getting mentioned is pretty nifty. What is even nicer is that while Cringely uses my old project, UPnP, as an example of why MS screws things up (not that I can disagree with him, UPnP was a lot of the reason I ended up quiting MS, see my article on the subject) he was kind enough to mention that I don't suck. That was very cool of him.