Microsoft Office Professional 2007 blog reed-sturt

The geek in query: Reed Sturtevant The job title: Managing Director of Microsoft Startup Labs What are you currently working on correct now?
Employing in Boston! Our group is in start-up mode. The very first of us received hired last drop, and now one can find 12 of us. We've obtained seven individuals who've accepted who haven't started yet. What sorts of things will you be functioning on?
The thought is to produce an internal, Boston-based improvement group that can construct products and launch them to market the identical way that start-ups do. We desire to do a whole bunch of goods in the same time, place them with each other from scratch. We’ll take ideas and concepts from within the company and figure out how to move these products through the early stages of creating a new business. Evaluate them. Work on prototypes. We're focused on the early stage, but with permission to ship. We've been asked to focus on two things: items that can attract a large enthusiastic audience, and to help drive new strategic platforms. So for example we're using the Live Mesh SDK and building a set of applications on top of that. So, you’re totally from start-up world, ideal?
Before coming here, I'd been functioning for 12 years with start-ups. To be honest, I'd stopped paying attention to Microsoft. Microsoft wasn't a competitor, because I was operating mostly with online start-ups. I hadn't really been using the tools because I'd totally been living the open source life. You know, clusters of Linux boxes, Java, MySQL. Ruby on Rails was the final big platform that I used. And I didn't even know what Microsoft was doing -- they weren't really relevant to me day-to-day. So when a occupation offer came up, I was skeptical. Yeah,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, I heard it took a year to recruit you into Microsoft!
I’d gotten a call about a project that was going on with the office of CTO, because of some work I had done with Idealab, where we'd done a entire bunch of companies, including Picasa -- OH MY GOD I LOVE PICASA!
I can't take credit for it, the core architect was a super amazing guy. Anyway, Microsoft had called me to talk about a next-gen photo thing, and I was like "Meh." But that conversation led to some meetings here in Boston about what I was doing and what I'd been operating on. It was clear that Microsoft was thinking of making a serious commitment to the Boston area, and trying to assemble a variety of different R&D efforts with the area. The conversation went on for a long time. I was like, "I'm busy ideal now with a start-up!" And I was so skeptical about Microsoft as a destination to work. But my skepticism was met with enthusiasm, with people saying things like "That's exactly the point! We require skeptics!" I saw that there was a huge appetite for change in the company. Folks were saying things like "We've really learned that we don't understand this particular point of view. We will need you to teach us things like how to think like a startup." So is this Microsoft higher-ups acknowledging "We have an existing process, and in this new market it isn't serving us well, so we require to learn something new"?
That's part of it, but in some ways it's additive. The existing process is quite successful and shouldn’t be replaced, but in uncertain territory an experimental, iterative approach works great. It's not just thinking about how to engineer a product, it's how to create a successful business. I think we can model our group's behavior around what's evolved with the start-up and VC communities. There are actually interesting market forces that lead you to act a certain way inside the start-up world. You have to constantly prove to someone else that it's worth taking the next step, by gathering real evidence. You have to pitch why it's so great, how you'd tackle it, how the logic works. VCs aren't going to say "Ok, here's $6 billion dollars," and then come back six years later to see how it turned out. Microsoft is a big boat to try to steer in a different direction. Do you feel like, in your year with the company, you've being able to turn the boat but?
Not quite yet, but that's ok. The best news is that we've acquired a lot of persons helping us, and nobody has said we're crazy. Links, please? Article about Reed's arrival at MSFT Reed on FriendFeed Reed on Facebook