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by com2kid 2432 days ago
Ah thanks for jogging memory in regards to the names. :)

> Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity.

Ah interesting, my understanding was that people who can gone through HiPo were sorta blessed. Then again I guess in theory the people who get selected for HiPo should already be doing the work to make their career velocity look good.

I saw all sorts of interesting stuff while I was at MS. It was a crazy place to work. It was sort of like working at a company that does everything 5-8 years too early, and then tries again 2-3 years too late.

* Tablets * eBooks * MP3 players * Smartphones * Smart TVs (Micorosft bought Web TV in 1997!! That is what, 15-20 years too early?) * Tablets again * Cloud based document syncing (See: What Sharepoint tried to be)

They also made some sort of automation creation tool for business users that, IIRC, got cancelled after one release and replaced with something else. I only know about it because I signed up to do internal user testing for it.

This is on top of all sorts of crazy one off projects. (In 2011 I was on a team attempting to make an autonomous household robot! How long before those become a viable thing outside of Roombas?)

1 comments

It was only because they weren’t good enough that they didn’t succeed, not that they were “too early”. Right idea, wrong execution, or frequently the hardware not being there yet, and not pouncing when it was.