While I was at Microsoft I\u2019d occasionally have chats with some of my colleagues about their next career steps.\u00a0 Sometimes it was about whether they should stay at Microsoft or take a job somewhere else.\u00a0 Other times, right after a major product release,\u00a0 the question was whether they should stay and work on the next version of the same product or whether they should move on to some different Microsoft project.<\/p>\n
After a while, I developed a fairly stock response to these sorts of questions. It was basically this:<\/p>\n
This is a really exciting time for computing.\u00a0 It reminds me of the first half the 1980\u2019s when personal computing was just starting to takeoff and make fundamental changes to society.\u00a0 Mainframe computing was still dominant but the visionaries<\/a> could quite accurately (in retrospect) describe what personal computing would be like in the year 2000. They just didn\u2019t know what specific technologies and business models would take us to that vision.\u00a0 It was up to the rest of us to actually make it happen.<\/p>\n It\u2019s similar today.\u00a0 Personal computers are still dominant but a new form of computing is really starting to takeoff. Visionaries<\/a> can describe what post-PC computing will be like in 2025.\u00a0 However, there is no predestined roadmap for how we are going to get there. \u00a0It\u2019s up to all of us to blaze the path.<\/p>\n So, it\u2019s 1984 again.\u00a0 Do you want to be Bill Gates<\/a> or Ken Olsen<\/a> .\u00a0 Do you want to work on enhancing OS360<\/a> or do you want to help create the Mac OS or Windows. Who you work for is secondary.\u00a0 The import question is do you want to help invent the future of computing or do you want to spend the rest of your career doing maintenance on PC era legacy software.<\/p>\n Eventually, I got around to taking my own advice. Creating the next era of computing is what I will be working on and something I will be writing about on this blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While I was at Microsoft I\u2019d occasionally have chats with some of my colleagues about their next career steps.\u00a0 Sometimes it was about whether they should stay at Microsoft or take a job somewhere else.\u00a0 Other times, right after a major product release,\u00a0 the question was whether they should stay and work on the next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wirfs-brock.com\/allen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}