Jane Kim: From Inventing To Implementing IE Features

Posted By: Charles | Jun 11th, 2008 @ 12:11 PM | 33,274 Views | 10 Comments
Jane Kim, senior program manager on the Internet Explorer team, talks about how the IE team really cares and connects with the community in this episode of WM_IN.  A Northwestern grad and seven year Microsoft vet, Jane discusses how the IE team has their own voice via the team blog and how they are striving hard to engage with their customers. 

As a PM on the team, Jane helps create new feature sets based on customer research and she works with the team to understand the scenarios in which customers will be utilizing those features.  Listen to Jane as she tells the story of how she went about pitching one of the new IE8 features, WebSlices, to her management.  (WebSlices enable users to subscribe to specially marked content on a Web page. When the content changes, the user receives a notification on the Favorites Bar.)  Ritzy and Carmine meet yet another woman who was good in math as a youngster in school (Perhaps this is a pattern, people?), and they enjoyed hearing Jane talk about why she became a PM instead of a developer (Debugging is for the birds!).
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#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 12:49 PM
Zeo
Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Awesome first question about firefox!

A former PM from NetDocs! Very cool, too bad it never shipped.

Interesting to hear her views on computer engineering vs computer science.

It's also interesting to hear that her high school had programming. 

I loved the turtle program!!!

I liked the question about how the IE team handles all of the negativity around what's happened in the past. Hearing her answer and her prespective was eye opening. 

Everytime I will use web slices I'll think of Jane. 

That was a thought provoking question about IE running on platforms other than windows. 

One Question I would love you to ask would be: Do you have any sisters and are they in technology/programming/engineering? 
#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 2:12 PM
KevinB
KevinB
Just watching video now, 1 comment from Charles around 12 mins in went something like

"things worked in IE but didn't work in Netscape, isn't that cos you guys always innovated HTML and the platform"

I think that is a little disingenious to the Netscape guys, 1 reason that it also may have worked so well on IE and not other platforms was because IE didn't stick to strict standards and in doing so hurt how well other platforms could render stuff that had been developed with IE primarily in mind.

Interesting discussion so far though, going to watch rest of it now, also enjoyed discussion around programming in Secondary schools and the Logo program (That is the the name of the turtle thing in UK/Ireland)
#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 4:24 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Well, what I was trying to articulate was that back in the day (early days of DHTML), things seemed to just work in IE (I did a lot of web development early in my MS career). It wasn't a slam on Netscape. Certainly, IE strayed from strict standards compliance back then, but it sure was easy to program to... That said, IE is much more in line with standards these days.

C
#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 5:03 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw
cool Smiley
btw has the reply highlitinh broken or something? its not worknig for me right now atleast (using ie8 beta one in ie7 mode)
#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 10:06 PM
intelman
intelman
OMG, I just watched a video with silverlight in Firefox 3!?!?! When does Channel8 get this kind of update?

Nice video, with people like Jane at Microsoft, I do have hope for the future.
#Jun 11th, 2008 @ 10:52 PM
Duncanma
Duncanma
Just Coding for Fun...

C8 will get this soon Smiley

Nothing we had to code for this one; we just received a new silverlight.js and published it out, it contained a fix to the browser detection logic making FF3 work.

#Jun 12th, 2008 @ 5:24 AM
KevinB
KevinB
Yeah, I guessed you weren't having a dig at Netscape, maybe just could have been worded better, or else I need to watch it again in case I misheard.

I haven't installed IE8 but hopefully all the work they have done on standards will make the web better for everyone. Webslices does sound like a fantastic feature.

Maybe the C9 team could even implement a webslice for individual forums posts? Sounds like an ideal application of the technology to me.

Thanks,
Kevin
#Jun 12th, 2008 @ 9:46 AM
rmtucker
rmtucker
You mentioned on the video about getting children interested in programming.  Here are three ways:

  1. Alice (Carnegie Mellon University) - http://www.alice.org/
  2. Scratch (MIT) - http://scratch.mit.edu/
  3. Kids Programming Language/Phrogram (The Phrogram Company) - http://phrogram.com

Mark

#Jun 13th, 2008 @ 5:26 AM
K0ogle
K0ogle
Well credits to her for coming up with webslices, Smiley  i'm just surprised she had to do so many presentation to get  those needed on board to get this featured added,  sounds a like a no brainer considering the rest of IE team seem to be in a sink of low creativity and doing anything right, this should have been lapped up.... its only thing in IE8 i've seen that shows any potential to be really good if they actually put more development time into improving it more.. Woudln't mind seeing more options for it, detachable, always ontop then you could chuck a streaming video into a webslice detach it and sling it off out of the browser frame while you carry on browsing, look C9 you could implement that for all your videos. Seeing IE still haven't added any interactive splitscreen/dualscreen feature in IE it would help. At the moment its very basic, kinda slow in resizing and you have very limited control of it not to mention poor customizing but thats seems to be expecting from every version of IE.

So if thats IE8 most interesting feature what have the rest of the team being doing before I start ripping into all the other poor end users areas of IE!
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