Mary Branscombe

game-changing; I see what you did there

also

Hardware Program Management, Director-IEB-Hardware (809195)

Job Category: Hardware Engineering

Location: United States, CA, Mountain View

Job ID: 809195

Division: Interactive Entertainment Business

Microsoft is working on revolutionizing consumer electronic devices. The team that incubated Kinect and profoundly changed the way people interact with technology is forming a product development team to change the world again! We are a growing team of experienced device product developers, working in a startup environment on redefining experiences by making technology disappear. We are developing ground-breaking hardware, software and experiences across computer vision, machine learning, human-computer interaction, image and video processing, networking and graphics. We will transform our ideas into reality through shipping a first-to-market product.

To be fair, I think Google honestly thought that it could convince Microsoft to ship Gears as a default plugin with IE, to get the adoption level of Flash; it only got the HTML5 religion the way it did when it realised that wasn't going to happen (there is a superb exchange between the Gears team & a member of the IE team at a Google IO session on Gears on how privacy fails in Gears would prevent this, that might still be on YouTube). I'm sure that like Microsoft and APIs it's deprecated, Google thought that many of these products would be successes that made it worth keeping the APIs around for ever, but Google doesn't give much notice when it kills things. And pointing out that Google jumping on the Facebook bashing bandwagon is sleazy doesn't feel nearly as sleazy as Google doing it in the first place.

I don't think of MIX as just a Web conference - I think of it as a dev and user experience confrence, but if you're wondering why people think it's a Web conference, try turning around: you're standing in front of the slogan 'the next Web now'!