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Office has shipped!

Big congratulations out to those working on Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, which is finally DONE! This really was a monumental release for us. About halfway through the release, the manager for each product in Office was asked to give a short demo of something cool their team was building. I remember having to demo our product, watching the other demos, and thinking, "Damn, that's amazing stuff, I hope people thing my demo is half as cool." And later, when my team switched to owning a platform component everyone depended on, I remember thinking, "Damn, we better get this thing working soon or those demos will never actually ship." Well, everyone pulled together, and now you can try for yourself all those amazing features we've built for you.

I found this statistic interesting: Microsoft announced their earnings today, and for the last quarter, the Business Division (which includes Office) represents about $2.6 billion in net profit for the company. To put that in perspective, that's more than all of Google. In fact, it's about the same as Google and Amazon put together. Just for Office. As an Office developer, it makes you think twice about how important each line of code is.

Collection of essays on software engineering

If you haven't already read Joel Spolsky's books on software (Joel on Software and Best Software Writing), I'd highly recommend them.  But while those are geared towards working on large projects at big companies, "Getting Real" from 37 Signals is a collection of essays about software engineering at a startup (and most of the lessons apply even if you are a team of one).  Better yet, it's free, so what have you got to lose?

Internet Math

This image from College Humor is intended as a parody, but there's quite a bit of truth in there:


It seems like most "new" startups are simply XX + Social, or YY + Mobile.  But, that business model seems to hinge on XX and YY neglecting to notice that the startup is trying to eat their lunch, and not immediately add the same functionality and squash said startup like a bug.