ivanplenty

Not to discount your experience, but at the large enterprises (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.), Program Managers make the same money as Software Developers at equivalent titles. Program Managers are not JIRA monkeys (I love JIRA, by the way), but generally have coded in the past and have a better grip on reality than some MBA candidates.

The tradeoff is this:

1) PMs get broader visibility across the org, which tends to result in faster promotions into management for "good" PMs.

2) PMs atrophy technical skills and become more dependent on the larger organization (they acquire more firm-specific skills in econ talk) than do equivalent developers.

So, sometimes if you like your company and want to advance quicker, you will be willing to trade away some industry or general skills for firm-specific skills to get faster promotions or more power.

tl;dr pr piece:

> · Customer content moving between customers and Microsoft will be encrypted by default.

> · All of Microsoft’s key platform, productivity and communications services will encrypt customer content as it moves between Microsoft data centers.

> · Strong cryptography to protect these channels, including Perfect Forward Secrecy and 2048-bit key lengths.

Microsoft already does each of these today (for sure Exchange and SQL, which I know the best), and they have done them for years now. Nothing changes. The more important question is how Microsoft manages the keys for this encryption, because when I was there the keys were still based on NSA-approved root keys...

I would upvote you, but alas new to posting here.

Yeah, agree that listening was the culprit. I guess what I'm saying is that many of the young people hear "I want a mobile version of my browser" and go off to build the windows CE version based on your literal desires. The fix to that doomed behavior isn't better listening, per se, because that connotes if you hear every word you understand what the customer really wants.

Most great products address an unarticulated need. In many ways, these unarticulated needs are NP Complete: They are hard to find solutions in polynomial time but are extremely easy to verify.

Agree on whole comment and about the need to connect with customers, but there is a subtlety with this line I would ask you caveat:

> Whatever they like doing, it's most likely not anything called "computing" and they just want more time to do that thing but find themselves too often distracted by "computing" to do it.

You're right, but unfortunately there are a lot of instances where the data initially shows otherwise. One naive way of looking at Google glass, for example, is that the early adopters did want wearable computing... and from that conclusion other electronics manufactures should make more types of wearables: watches, pedometers, shoes, etc. Surprise, surprise... many of the wearables have failed (looking at you Samsung) despite based heavily on the initial market research because they didn't actually do anything useful.