Recently in Microsoft Category

Nice article by Tandy Trower, the Microsoft Windows 1.0 product manager, about his role in creating Microsoft Windows 1.0. His article matches my recollections quite closely.

I still have my shrink-wrapped Windows 1.01 box, one of the first 25 copies of the retail edition of Microsoft Windows in the world.

Very sad news today in the Seattle PI -- Jeff Harbers died when his single-engine plane crashed on takeoff in Big Timber, Montana this weekend. Jeff was an incredibly bright, humorous, and effective manager of the Office group at Microsoft in the 1980's. I worked under Jeff when I was on the Excel for Windows team in the mid 80's. Though it's nearly twenty years since I've been in touch with Jeff, I remember him well, and I know he will be missed.

Most anyone who has tried Microsoft's Live.com has seen that performance is a problem. Here's what Microsoft is learning about performance from building Live.com. Scott Isaacs talks about some of the challenges inherent in building client-centric interactive applications that run in a browser. Some of the issues are reducing the number of connections to the server, XML parsing time, and server vs. client rendering. Some good insight into Microsoft's process.