istartedsomething

Over time, I’ve gathered quite a nice collection of interviews with some of the most uninteresting people on this planet, they’re ridiculously boring and uninspired. Just kidding of course. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of being able to interview some great people, often uncredited and unassociated with all the cool technologies out there. So here is a showcase of who they are and what they have done.

Ranked in order of importance, or otherwise known as dates descending.

Don Lindsay

Design Director, Microsoft Live Labs

Microsoft Live Labs is an applied research organization focused on the incubation of innovative, internet-centric technologies to accelerate the evolution of Microsoft’s internet products and services.

Kip Kniskern

Microsoft Windows Live enthusiast (Inside the Insiders)

We hear both sides. Some of our biggest fans are at Microsoft. ‘Softies have told us they come to us to find out what’s going on. We’ve stepped on a few toes along the way, too, so that can’t be fun - nothing like finding out your secret project isn’t secret anymore. I think in general Live employees just wished they could talk more about their projects. We see the pain in their eyes when they want to talk about something cool but they just can’t.

Robert Stein

Microsoft enthusiast website administrator (Inside the Insiders)

ActiveWin has tens of thousands of pages of published content over the past 10 years. We’ve attracted the attention of the highest in the industry and we’ve broke a lot of news. We’re the oldest and I think still one of the best and that’s why we continue to stick around.

Sandro Villinger

Microsoft enthusiast writer (Inside the Insiders)

A couple of months later a German publisher came to me asking if I was interested in writing a book about the upcoming XP release, of course I (being only 17 at the time) was totally crazy about such an idea. After that they put me to the magazine department and I wrote my first article for the “PC Praxis” in July 2002. It was about the first rumors of “Windows Longhorn” (yep, when WinFS and everything was still envisioned). I stayed as a regular until today and started writing for a couple of other publications as well.

Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft journalist blogger (Inside the Insiders)

Believe it or not, after all these years, I still love breaking a story. I love the chase and the fun of getting a new piece of info first. So for me, the best moments have involved getting new/cool/interesting info and being able to turn it into a scoop. Worst moment? Being WRONG! Everyone is sometimes. You just hope the times you hit outpace the times you miss, in this business.

Brandon LeBlanc

Blogger and Microsoft enthusiast (Inside the Insiders)

I’ve been excited and following Microsoft since the Windows 95 Beta (previously I was pretty good with Windows 3.1). I was 11 years old beta testing Windows 95 on my dad’s old HP Vectra cause he didn’t have time to test it. I remember following IE4 pretty closely and so on. I used to tell my dad I wanted to work at Microsoft someday. He would use that as a tactic for me getting the best grades. If I got a bad grade, he would always say “you’ll never work at Microsoft with those kind of grades” and I’d always improve them.

Robert McLaws

Blogger and Microsoft enthusiast (Inside the Insiders)

The term “fanboy” gets a bad rap, but I’ll say yes, I am. I mean, everyone knows that I gave up on drinking the Kool-aid, and started snorting it in powder form. But for me it’s not about individual technologies, it’s about mindset of the company. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any other company on the planet that cares for their partners as much as Microsoft. And that’s why I love the company.

Li-Yi Wei

Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia

HDR imaging and display has been a hot thing in both research and industry, but so far no good solution has been offered for converting LDR (low-dynamic range) content into HDR (high-dynamic range), especially for historical documents where you don’t have the luxury to take multiple photos with different exposures. This is a classical ill-posed and under-constrained problem, and if you use traditional computer vision techniques, it is never going to work.

Christian Schmidt

Product Manager, Ventuz Technology

The presentations definitely achieve something which has been missing for the better part of a decade, the WOW-factor - the ability to catch the audience’s attention. PowerPoint and Flash are simply boring and everybody has seen everything that can be done with those tools. In that regard, 3D was the next logical step.

Hamad Darwish

Flickr photographer, Windows Vista

Photography to me right now is just a way to escape reality and the daily routine. I feel a great deal of happiness when I’m out in the outdoors shooting, because it is my own time and I get to enjoy it, spend it the way I want. If photography becomes a career, this beautiful feeling might fade away.

Tjeerd Hoek

Director of user experience design for Windows

It is the reality of designing products for lots and lots of people in the real world, who do real things with it. We have a very large and very diverse ecosystem with lots of different people using Windows for lots of different purposes on tons of different hardware. That’s a large part of our success actually; the flexibility and scale of this whole ecosystem. Basically, that success also gives us the responsibility and a variety of considerations to keep in mind.

Matthew Goldberg

Vista Guided Help development lead

Not everybody has a friend who works at a computer company who can help walk them through the steps they need in order to solve their problem. Well, that’s where Guided Help comes in. We wanted to build something into the system, that could help walk you through the confusing parts and give you that assistance you needed automatically. While we were at it, we wanted to make it fun, intuitive, and really cool-looking.

Peter Barlow

Director of CyberActive Media and eGames expo organiser
An interesting and insightful conversation (although it was mainly Peter talking) about planning and executing a large-scale industry-first exhibition like the eGames games and entertainment expo in Melbourne, Australia.

Dave Vronay

Vista AERO UX Compliance

In the future, we really need to think of Windows’ UI as a large content-centric project, like a game. And manage the visual quality the same way. After all, we have about the same number of assets as a game; thousands of icons, bitmaps, etc.

Andrew McGlinchey

Vista Control Panel Program Manager

It’s a classic design tradeoff, where there are contradictory requirements: change it while keeping it the same! So within those constraints, we’ve worked hard to make Vista innovative while still being a continuation of what came before. We’ve made choices that we think should delight most of the people most of the time.

Stephen Coy

Vista UI Strategy Team & Screensavers designer

During my time away from MS I had written a bunch of graphics hacks that I thought would make good screensavers so I dusted them off and wrapped them into an updated screensaver framework. These eventually became Aurora, Mystify, Ribbons and Bubbles.

Oliver Scholz

Vista Speech User Experience Program Manager

We’ll focus on taking advantage of speech recognition’s potential to make speech a more efficient way to interact with your computer than the mouse and keyboard are today. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could say “Send an email to my mother about lunch next week”, and the computer would open your email program, fill in your mother’s email address, fill in the subject line with “Lunch next week” and put the cursor in the email body so that you could just start to dictate?