ryanburk

Brad Feld had one of the most insightful and helpful blogs, particularly before the golden era of tech/vc twitter and there wasn't much out there for folks not in the club. hope this gives him more time to post more.

earlier / dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37991863

this is announcing the closing of the deal (late last month)

a lifetime ago back at Microsoft, Peter Spiro described these folks job expectation as "walk on water". if you wanted to exceed expectations, you had to "leave no wake"...

note that they already supported this migration capability to AWS and Azure.

example: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/industry-blog/microsoft-in-...

is there a reason why a large % of the board turned over in the past ~year, leading in to an IPO?

> Ms. Ford English was appointed to our board of directors in May 2020 and stepped down from our board of directors in May 2021.

> Mr. Hinrichs stepped down from our board of directors in May 2020.

> Mr. Jameel stepped down from our board of directors in July 2021.

> Mr. Kaul stepped down from our board of directors in July 2021.

> Mr. Sheriff stepped down from our board of directors in May 2021.

source??

agreed - I think the title should be updated to call out the "app" shuts down.

presales, consulting, and support.

will be interesting to see what they do that goes beyond the acquisition of semmle. it is great to see how quickly they have been able to integrate that work.

the tools needed to create WinPE - that shipped in the OEM preinstallation kits (OPK) - did do some work against the original files to make the magic happen. it was mainly around the special registry dB needed to get it to boot, not changing the files themselves. we also did a ton to try to slim it down, originally to get it to fit on a CDROM or RIS/PXE boot. well before USB sticks got larger than CDROMs.

there is a lot of WinPE interest in the thread. I was part of the core team that came up with the idea and built it[0] and it is great to see how useful it has been for so many!

I'm happy to answer questions if folks are interested.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...

just a note: this commingling only happens if it is "fulfilled by Amazon" vs buying directly from the 3rd party through Amazon.

I believe it is skewed since many people in these neighborhoods aren't making their money through salary income (anymore), but instead through interest / dividends.

If you sold your company, aren't working at FB/goog/etc and are sitting on a ton of stock holdings, your income is going to show as near $0

historically they have been in archived in "C:\Windows.old" and later are removed when a new update is installed or if you use disk cleanup->system files. there used to be logic to clean this up proactively if disk space was too low, but my hands on knowledge here is >4yrs old.

this is different than the side-by-side (WinSxS) support that allows parallel versions of the same dll to live on the system. that used to grow at huge rates when you had lots of system updates + lots of apps.

the first rule of the mobile passport app is don't talk about mobile passport!! it is great, generally the same experience as global entry. and I'm worried that if more people use it, it will become as busy as everything else.

not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.

it is really important to be aware that the duration of the freeze varies based on your state - it isn't always "until you lift it". I believe pennsylvania is an example where it is a 7 year term.

they have definitely changed the source control infrastructure and are now on git.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...

is there any source on this?

he was so humble for someone so intelligent. even though it was 15yrs ago at this point, I still am struck by how happy he was to come to redmond for 3 days to sit through design discussions for work that became the basis of roles / minimal windows. was a great role model that you didn't need to show you were the smartest person in the room. RIP

> There's no technical reason this cannot be offered

this actually isn't true. and I say this as the person who pushed for a 32->64bit upgrade path at microsoft in longhorn. at the most basic level - it is easy for the core OS. but any apps you've installed are going to be a crapshoot to see if they work, with their installers only expecting a 32bit OS, registry, etc.

upgrade is hard enough as it is so risking the experience to a customer of breaking many of their apps with no good path to resolution isn't worth it versus waiting ~3-5 years for a PC purchase cycle and their next preinstalled version of windows being 64bit and going from there.

the microsoft process cost for many individual patches versus larger collections isn't the real issue. behind the scenes, it should be essentially the same. it is a real issue for customers, particularly in IT, to deal with and manage all of those micropatches. especially in a world where you are responsible for validating every patch against your countless internal apps, deployments of updates are not trivial, and you have scenarios like finance where there is SOX compliance, auditing, etc. this is why the model of patch tuesday and the predictability of knowing when the patches were coming (regardless of number) and ability to plan your testing & deployment was loved by IT departments.

the additional tradeoff you need to consider is that the smaller you make the patches, the larger the number of variations you need to test for later patches, updates, app compat, etc. that is why service packs were a thing - you could baseline after a period of many patches getting out there, and start the process again.

(full disclosure: I used to work on and around some of this at microsoft many moons ago)

and one of the big challenges is getting unadulterated feedback. too often, even if you do your best to set up a culture of trust and openness with your employees, you will get a filter on what they are going to tell you.

having ways to anonymously get regular feedback from your team can help a lot. as well as getting as much second hand data from other teams / managers as possible.

true, but the theme is fairly timeless. I've always heard it (and seen this personally as an employee and manager myself) boiled down to "people don't leave companies, they leave managers".[1] and there is a lot of writing / data out there to support it.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2015/08/04/people-l...

accounts doesn't mean the same thing as current or active users. a company very likely doesn't delete accounts right away or at all, even if the service has been cancelled. for example, a few years ago microsoft's live ID system had well over a billion accounts. but MAU was only around 450M. and that is with culling / deleting accounts after a year if they were unused.

re: scale and on demand: "you only pay for the compute that you need, down to a 100ms boundary in the case of AWS Lambda"

it will be interesting to see how small these boundaries can become before it is too expensive to measure at the level of granularity sought. when you can spin up a container, run job, and destroy faster than you can even log.

hotmail / outlook does still delete email from inactive accounts, and then the account itself. you have to log in every <270 days (9 months) to keep the system from deleting your mail and in <12 months to keep your email address/account alive.[1] but you will get emails to your secondary email address as a warning before this happens. gmail also does the same, but likely on a longer time horizon[2].

[2] I worked on outlook.com and http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Will-Google-deactivate-my-Gmail-accoun...

some history: this was introduced with XP SP2 as part of the windows security push. was a clever way to track the information without touching the binary data directly and supporting it in IE meant the majority of customers saw the benefit right away. and since most people (in windows) don't move files across file systems.

microsoft has a history of leaving large acquisitions where they are. skype (global), powerpoint, hotmail, yahoo ads, & webTV (mountain view), yammer (sf), dynamics (north dakota, but grew in redmond), an app virtualization thing (boston)