Charles

Ted Kummert, S. Somasegar (Soma), Bill Laing: On Trifecta Launching and Working Together - Enter SQL

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Ted Kummert, S. Somasegar and Bill Laing are the heads of state of the Data Division, Developer Division, and Windows Server respectively. Since we just launched three major products, Visual Studio 2008 (RTM), SQL Server (not shipped yet) and Windows Server 2008 (RTM) we thought it would be a good idea to get the three leaders of these product organizations to sit down together and talk about how they work together as divisions and as leaders of divisions.

So, how do leaders work together effectively? What do heads of product groups actually do? How technically involved with product development are vice presidents? How do they work together to minimize technical reduncancy across divisions (innovation happens; sometime innovative technologies arise independently and in parallel. They may represent the same solution to a given problem or problem set. What's a VP to do in this case?).

As always, it's an extreme pleasure to get to talk with senior leaders of Microsoft who are responsible for a large chunk of Microsoft's continued success as a business in an insanely competitive industry that constantly changes.

You've heard all about the products that have launced today if you follow product launch events and read the news. It's truly a momentous day for all of us at Microsoft and especially for you, the consumer and developer who use and rely upon these great technologies. Now, meet the heads of state who are responsible (and ultimately accountable) for your overall satisfaction. We're all lucky to have Ted, Soma and Bill running the show for SQL, VS and Windows Server.

Enjoy!

Low res version here.

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Microsoft Exeutives, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows Server

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The Discussion

  • User profile image
    RichardRudek
    I don't know what to think about this 'new style'. At the start, there was too much camera hopping, which made me stop the video, and try to come online and complain.

    As the site was (is still) having trouble, I decided to try watching it again, and eventually the camera hopping subsided to a more acceptable level, instead using slow zooms.

    Content-wise, there wasn't a lot of value, so if it wasn't for my aggravation with the production, I wouldn't have commented... Expressionless
  • User profile image
    Charles
    RichardRudek wrote:
    I don't know what to think about this 'new style'. At the start, there was too much camera hopping, which made me stop the video, and try to come online and complain.

    As the site was (is still) having trouble, I decided to try watching it again, and eventually the camera hopping subsided to a more acceptable level, instead using slow zooms.

    Content-wise, there wasn't a lot of value, so if it wasn't for my aggravation with the production, I wouldn't have commented...


    Content-wise, you don't think it's valuable to know how VPs interoperate and what they do for a living at Microsoft? That's fine. I found it worthy of C9, but I'm just me... This certainly is not a technical interview. As for the camera hopping, I agree. We will fine tune this approach. Thank you, as always, for your feedback.

    To be clear. This is 'another' style and the 'C9' style will not go away. I promise.

    C
  • User profile image
    irascian
    Variety is the spice of life so I had no problems with the content. If nothing else it's interesting to see three big 'higher ups' sharing their thoughts with us about the way they work, so it's all good even if as a developer it might come across as relatively free of the technical nitty gritty that is our main interest .

    I did find the camera switching and movement distracting, particularly with the camera's being so far apart so that the perspective of where the speaker was looking kept switching all over the place. But this is hard to fix in a fairly ad-hoc situation when you have three different folks all interacting quite quickly but addressing themselves to a fixed position interviewer who isn't moving.  The dreary "single static fixed position" for filming and shaky wobbly cam that can result when trying to focus on the person that's actually talking gets rather dull after a while.

    Personally I don't think the usual Channel 9 "single camera in a fixed position" style would have worked given there are three people all trying to share equal time.
  • User profile image
    KevinB
    I didn't actually have time to watch the video so I grabbed the WMA and just listened to it. I thought it was a great interview, all three were very interesting to listen to and Charles' questions led the conversation as exactly the right pace. It wasn't technical but you could guess that from the title and the people involved.

    Great interview, Soma as always was good to listen to, he just seems so passionate about what he does.

    Kevin
  • User profile image
    littleguru
    I liked the interview too. It's not much content, speaking of how did you implement feature x and why but more the general overview and how they interact. From time to time it went a little bit into marketing speech but I guess that's normal...
  • User profile image
    elmer
    I must admit that, having never travelled on an airline with the so-called 'Channel-9' I never saw any significance in the name... but now that I know the meaning, I can see why this sort of internal chat would rate relevance on the site.

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