Tomorrow, friday, is my last day at Microsoft. I've been there for a little over 7 years, plus 2 internships. I've helped (in large or small part) ship Microsoft Team Manager, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, Windows NT 4, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2k3 and Windows XP SP2. I've been working with a great group of people on Avalon and Longhorn for the past couple of years. It is really hard to say goodbye to so many friends and such a great group. But I feel that it is time to move on to new challenges.
I'm going to be going to go work for Google. It looks like I'll be staying in the Seattle area for now. Don't ask me what I'll be doing because I honestly don't know. I'm going to be working with a good group of guys that I've worked with before. I trust that they are working on interesting technology. Hopefully we'll be able to make a splash at some point. Chances are that I won't be able to talk about it here for quite a while though.
The decision to leave Microsoft has been a very difficult one. I still believe in the Avalon vision and plan. I'm more excited than ever about the technology. Even though I knew that I was going to leave a couple of weeks ago, I meant everything that I've posted and said. You can be sure that my excitement over the recent changes to the Longhorn and Avalon ship plans aren't the company line. If I disagreed I would have said so. What are they going to do, fire me? In some ways I feel like I've made my impact on the Avalon project. I've been there since the start and helped shape what it is today. There is a lot of work to do yet, but the broad strokes are in place. Now I'm just like most of you reading this: I'm going to be a user of the Avalon technology instead of one of the guys developing it. I wish those losers would get off their butts and ship already :)
It has been an exciting month and a half or so. I sat down for coffee with a coworker who is working for Google sometime in late July. We chatted and he told me about the way that Google works and how much fun he was having there. The thing that really attracted me was the fact that it was just a smaller company with smaller groups. After working on such large projects for so long, I was really ready to try something on a smaller scale. Plus, I've been working for MS for my entire professional life and I'm going to have to diversify at some point. Anyway, I got a resume to him and flew down to Mountain View for an interview. Things went well and I accepted the offer last week. As a point of reference, I didn't find out about the Longhorn schedule shake up until a few weeks after I started the whole process.
What does this mean for my blog? Nothing really. I'm still going to talk Avalon -- I just won't have the inside line anymore. My knowledge will probably go stale in the next month or so. Eventually I hope to talk about Google stuff, but I'm going to have to feel out where the lines are.
Wish me luck!