The job title: General Manager, Presentation Platform and Tools
What are you doing right now?
I’m the General Manager of Presentation Platform and Tools, which is about 170 people who work on Windows Presentation Foundation. We also have the Jolt team internally, which is all the graphical animation media parts and Silverlight. And I have a tools team called Cider that delivers tools for both those groups to use. It’s your traditional developer/test/PM kinda organization.
How many years have you been with Microsoft?
Seventeen years this summer. I came straight out of college — well, technically I worked for a UK company for about five minutes, but basically I’d just graduated and came for an internship in 1990.
Can you tell me how many different positions you’ve had?
I couldn’t possibly tell you that. Titles have changed probably once a year. I started in development, then switched to project management. Then I became a test manager, before moving into general management and strategy.
It’s been new roles, new titles, new challenges every year or so. I stopped putting my title on my business card years ago because it was getting out of date so quickly. So now they just have my name, and Microsoft.
And Braille.
Yes, and Braille.
So, you’re a quintessential career Microsoftie. This has been your Masters degree, and probably by this point your PhD, too.
…And an MBA in there somewhere.
Right! Tell me about your MBA from Microsoft.
In terms of getting an MBA, I debated going back to school, but Microsoft has great training program on the leadership tracks. And Wharton Business School leads ongoing training courses for Microsoft employees — you get to spend a week talking with some of the industry’s best trainers. And for free!
You get access to a great peer group too — a lot of other Microsoft people from other departments, and all over the planet! A lot of the classes have students from all over Europe and Asia, and so you get this great perspective which you just wouldn’t get from a typical MBA program. I still go to those classes. There are always new ones.
What products have you worked with?
I’ve been all over the place because I wanted to try different things in different groups. I interned in Languages — which is now Developer Division with 2000 people. It was a lot smaller back then. Then I got into Windows. It wasn’t an obvious success at the time — it was just another project that might be a hit, or it might not. After five years, I was still having a blast, but wanted to try something different. So from there I went to IE and Java. And now WPF.
So, you’ve worked on Windows, which is used by bazillions of people —
It’s about a billion now. Somewhere between 800,000 million and a billion, I think? It’s ridiculous because it was 10 people when I started.
A billion people — that means your work has touched one sixth of the planet?
When you put it like that it’s kind of scary. But, yeah. It’s a huge number of people.
Does that keep you up at night?
Not really. But maybe it should! I don’t think about it other than feeling this general responsibility to a large number of people who base their lives on some of the software we produce — they can’t get around, they can’t function, they can’t do their jobs, they can’t manage their families — if we don’t do a good job on our side.
But it doesn’t have to be billions of people to feel that way. It could be 10 people — if they really care about your product and are depending on you, it’s important.
So when you’re not working on software that’s impacting a sixth of the planet, what do you do?
I have a house on Vashon Island, and so I spent my time away from work plowing fields and building fences.
Links to make you happy:
- Silverlight
- Windows Presentation Platform & Tools on MSDN
- Ian’s Channel 9 video about Windows history (check out Ian’s mysterious accent!)
- Ian on Facebook
