Thursday, August 28, 2003

While I have been helping a number of customers, a number of Microsoft employees volunteered to help Microsoft PSS support customers who had the MSBlast virus.  I would like to thank Robert Scoble, Steven Makofsky, Chris Anderson and the other Microsoft employees who took the time to help.  From their posts, it definitely was not in their job requirements to do this type of work.  I know that they learned a lot.  I know that they will take the lessons that they learned to heart and apply it to their current work assignments.  I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds of many Microsoft employees.  The interesting thing I noted is that I did not see any entries about helping out in PSS from program managers, product managers, or marketing.  These are the people that I wanted helping out.  Why?  Because they are ultimately responsible for determining which features get into the product, which bugs get fixed, which get delayed to the next version, etc.  These are the type of people who need to walk in their customer's shoes.  Robert has talked about how Microsoft executives are compensated based on many satisfied customers there are.  I am just one developer, and in next year's performance review I will be judged on how I quickly I supported customers and my company's Tech Support, as well as how quickly I developed fixes or workarounds for those problems.  Robert and the others at Microsoft had an eye-opening experience directly supporting end-users.  For me, that is part of my everyday job.  I hope that Microsoft makes it a part of everyone's everyday job. 11:11:36 PM    comment []  trackback []

One of the reasons that I have not been posting was that I was tied up doing a lot of customer support for several electric utilities.  These support cases started well before the blackout.  I do know that out Tech Support was called to help a number of power plants dump their respective data and logs as part of the investigation.  My test system in the office can log nearly 2 million events and 10 million sensors readings per day.  It will take some time to syncrhonize all the data from 100 power plants and determine the sequence of events that led to the blackout.  It is interesting to live in Twinsburg, just a few miles from where several of the failed power lines are located.  I also work a couple of miles from First Energy's Eastlake plant.  Every day the local news and TV stations present some new piece of information or new video footage.  Today, they had amateur footage from just before the blackout which showed a power line arcing to a tree. 10:41:35 PM    comment []  trackback []

I have not posted in while.  I have been very busy doing a lot of customer support.  Well it is time to start putting up some posts. 9:06:43 PM    comment []  trackback []

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