Sorry I have not been blogging lately, but that will change, starting with this announcement!

 

One of the things I have always treasured about working at Microsoft is the ability to, every once and a while, take a look around and strike out to do something radically different.  I started in April of 1994 in Product Support Services, moving from support to Beta product work to technical writing to world wide training over an eight year period down in Las Colinas, Texas.  I kind of think of that time as MSCareer 1.0.

 

Since October of 2002 it’s been a privilege to work in computer security for the company, first at the MSRC doing bulletins and cases, then handling crisis events and communications publicly and now work on our security reputation and product features.  It’s been a wild ride that really sort of marked MSCareer 2.0.

 

But anyone who knows me knows my real passion is video games.  

 

Video games and interactive entertainment in general is changing pretty radically.  It’s rapidly evolving from an entirely packaged game experience into a world where interactions between users and the creation and sharing of user-created content can actually become as important, (or even more important) than the packaged experience. Not long ago, the Xbox team approached me for my ideas on this evolution, building on the work they were already doing in this space.

 

It is with a great deal of excitement that I have accepted their offer to join the Entertainment and Devices division to work on that very topic. On August 13th I will be moving to Millennium to join the Live Services Group to work on developing strategy and features so that people continue to have enjoyable and safe experiences on Xbox LIVE as the interaction between users and the amount of in-game user-generated content grows. This will be an exciting new challenge as this role is purely policy and developer program management, it has nothing to do with communications or security! (they have plenty of talented people off doing that stuff, so this will be a nice break from doing network/software security)

 

So thus begins MSCareer 3.0. 

 

It’s hard to express in words the privilege it has been to work alongside so many dedicated and talented people.  The past five years have been an amazing time for our company and for the industry.  The work that Security Business Unit and the Trustworthy Computing group has done has truly been historical.  I have learned so much from all the people in those organizations, and I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to have represented and contributed to so much great work that is done.

 

Most importantly, the work being done in TwC is and will continue to be groundbreaking and exciting, and I wish everyone the very best of luck. I do sincerely hate to leave, but getting to be a part of our efforts around digital entertainment was simply too good to pass up.  

 

So what does this mean for Stepto.com?  Well of course I will continue to write about topics such as security and gaming, those are still interests for me.  But also I’ll be sharing a lot of what it’s like to work on digital entertainment and fill you in from time to time on interesting challenges or new stuff that we’re doing.

 

Be sure to check in the week of August 13th as well, because I had the idea that I would blog each day of my first week detailing what it’s like to completely change groups and even campuses!