Microsoft’s Effort to Build Apps and Reward Engineers | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s Effort to Build Apps and Reward Engineers

nytimes.com

35 pointswoan16 comments

Thanks for posting this :). Earlier thread when my wife and I created the app here -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173298

This entire PR exercise has been fun. It went something like this

- Pitch TC with a very standard email. I was up the previous night looking through HN for advice on pitch emails. TC wrote a great post on us (it helped that both Path and Instagram announced funding that day)

- Pitch Techflash with the TC post. Todd Bishop is a great guy and he had done an earlier article on an older app of mine so this was a nice tie-in.

- Mail Anne Eisenberg of the NYT and point to both of the above. I had interacted with Anne several years ago and dug out her email address. Anne is just an amazing person and it has been great fun to work with her this past few weeks. Anne also pulled in Microsoft PR who pulled in Brandon Watson who run the show when it comes to Windows Phone development.

For both Aarthi and me, coming from a typical developer/engineer background, this entire experience has been very educational.

Now I'm off to see how many hits I got from the NYT linking to bubblegum.me :)

Brilliant and Congrats... I am going to try out the app today :)

Thanks! let us know if you have any feedback (support@bubblegum.me)

Thanks for writing up the PR process. Interesting, and potentially useful in the future.

I have to give props to Sriram...I usually don't get the NYTimes calling me about being in a story. He sold them all on his own. Great personal effort on his part.

Thanks Brandon - we appreciate all the support from you guys :).

To be clear, Aarthi (arithmetic on HN) did more than half the work, both in terms of code and in PR. It turns out that being married to someone who can code circles around you has its benefits :).

Separately, I think that helped with some of the press - the fact that we were a married couple (and her being a leading female coder/engineer in an industry which doesn't have that many) added a human interest angle.

In terms of Microsoft's external efforts to spur on WP7 development, I haven't been as impressed. Maybe it's just that I'm bitter about sitting through an evening's worth of presentations with a room full of iPhone developers at MS's Mountain View campus and not being offered a free developer phone at the end ;-) But seriously, Google has done a lot of developer outreach to try to catch up with Apple, yet I don't see MS doing much other than expecting us developers upgrade to the latest Windows, buy ourselves a copy of Visual Studio, find and purchase a WP7 handset, etc., etc.

I run developer mktg for phone. Sad to hear you think we aren't doing a good job.

Handing out phones to everyone is a bad ROI. Are you building apps? If yes, we have phones for people commited to building on the WP7 platform. Send me an email at brwatson at Microsoft and we'll get you sorted.

Oh, and our tools for WP7 are free.

If you're serious I'll take you up on that. Sent you an email.

Thanks for the e-mail reply Brandon. Looks like MS really is serious about getting other devs on board!

I suspect you may come to regret posting that.

Why?

Oh, I should specify. The developer outreach folks at MS, like Ben Riga and Bruno Terkaly, have been very helpful at answering my questions. My disappointment is more with the overall rollout to developers, or a lack of one that I've seen around the Bay Area.

As a point of reference, I can barely stand the Android developer tools, but I've appreciated how regularly over the past ~2 years Google has invited me and my colleagues to training events, kept us stocked with the latest developer handsets, and so on.

O.K., I guess I forgot about the free version of Visual Studio Express.

I agree with one theme of the article. It is a good idea for Microsoft to encourage its developers (and other employees) to write WP7 apps. Pizza parties etc. are also good.

However, the article is misleading when it talks about "rule changes".

>>"We tend to have strict moonlighting rules," he said of the company."But we’ve changed those rules so developers can do this in their spare time"

>>MICROSOFT’S new rules fit into the broader rethinking of how large companies manage research.

For most of the past decade, Microsoft had fairly liberal moonlighting rules. You could start your own business and work on it as long as you didn't see a conflict of interest with your work at Microsoft.

In the 90s, manager approval was required for moonlighting. For most or all of the 00s, you didn't even need to inform your manager about moonlighting (unless you saw a potential conflict of interests)

These rules aren't new (and have nothing to with WP7). In fact, many of the people I know used these liberal moonlighting rules to write iPhone apps in 2008. Some of them are still at Microsoft and some of them quit Microsoft after their iOS business did well.

Not true. We had to make changes to how IP was treated. Yes employees can work on non-related-to-MSFT stuff, but profiting from apps would have had troubles without changes to the policy. It was the collective work of a lot of people associated with WP7 that made this happen.

The main problem that Microsoft is facing is the same as they faced with Silverlight.

Developers are only one part of the equation. It's the designers and creative/visual developers that you need to make your platform really stand out.

For what it's worth though I saw the Windows OS on WMC and it looked pretty great especially for games. Although I am not sold on their basic GUI, but time will tell.

I am not saying this to belittle the importance of developers but that is to me rather obvious.

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