The Visual Studio Documentary: Tony Goodhew full length interview

There is no audio with SL on XP.

It's quite amazing to hear these interviews from people who have basically been there since the beginning, and have watched these products evolve into what they are today.

From all these interviews, here is what I have gathered:

1. Development is hard, plain and simple.  Microsoft is doing their best doing their best to align their products into a single coherent vision, and you know what, that’s hard problem to solve

2. If Sun didn't sue Microsoft during the late 90s, .NET might have never existed.  This is a terrifying thought given how much I love managed code

3. Microsoft, in some respects, is expected to cure cancer, diabetes and world hunger, or at least that is the bar the world has set for the organization

4. People expect Microsoft to solve all their problems, and when they don’t, hell hath no fury like a scorned developer

Lastly, it would be awesome if the same interviews were done around Office, Windows, and SQL Server.

Well this may just be my favorite video in the series to date. Just awesome to hear the war stories and from someone who is clearly passionate about what they do - and who doesn't pull their punches. I find myself slightly envious of the folks who have Tony Goodhew as their boss. Can we please get him back for the Visual Studio 2020 documentary!

One of the best interviews so far in the VS Documentary series

Another great installment of The Visual Studio Documentary!! I hope you guys just keep these coming! Also, as stated previously by someone else, it would be awesome for you guys to do a series like this on Windows.

Like the first commentor, I'm not getting any audio.  I tried both Firefox and IE (current updates on both) and I have the current Silverlight.

These interviews are great but the camera moves a bit too much for me. The constant zoom-in-zoom-out and movement makes me dizzy

@NullUserName:Here's how Tony was rehired into Microsoft in 1998-ish (as I recall; I'd be happy to have Tony weigh in with corrections/clarifications).
I was a Technical Evangelist on Microsoft's anti-Java team at the time, and I was visiting Australia to try to get it to vote "no" on accepting Java as a standard, and to give a "pro COM, anti CORBA" presentation while I was there. Tony was working for IBM Australia, and giving a pro-CORBA presentation.
In between talks, he zoomed right over to me with business card in hand and asked me to join him for a drink after the presentations, at which he said that CORBA -- which he had just pimped in his talk, mind you -- was a hopeless piece of *, that IBM couldn't code its way out of a paper bag, and he really, REALLY wanted to rejoin Microsoft...but that the Aussie subsidiary wouldn't hire him back because of, well...let's have another round, shall we?
I was very impressed with his presentation -- his grasp of the technologies, the competitive issues, the decision factors, his presentation technique, his charisma, etc. If he hadn't believed a word of his own talk, then he had great acting talent, too -- so I asked around as to why he'd been invited to leave Microsoft originally.
The story I got back was that he had gone on stage to give an important presentation -- you know, wireless mic, big screen, live demos, etc. -- and in mid-presentation, said "excuse me for a moment," walked behind stage for a minute or two, and then came back and resumed his presentation.
Which would have been no big deal, if he'd remembered to turn off his wireless mic while barfing his guts up from the previous night's pub crawl (or "chundering a dog's breakfast," as he might say).
I pushed hard for him to be hired into Microsoft's tools group, but got a LOT of pushback from HR against hiring someone who was reputed to have an alcohol problem. He was hired, in part, because of my counter-argument, which was that he demonstrably DIDN'T have an alcohol problem; he had a wireless mic problem. If he'd remembered to turn that off, there would have been no issue.
I'm proud to have helped Tony get hired back into Microsoft. He was a strong ally in the battle to get Visual Studio opened up to non-Microsoft languages (which some very senior people, highly praised elsewhere in the documentary, fought mightily against).
Ah, the good ol' days.  I'm happy to see Tony still fighting the good fight.  ;-)
--- Jim "JamesPl" Plamondon
Microsoft Technical Evangelist, 1992-2000