- Some people, both at Microsoft and outside of Microsoft,
they don't like that I get the tips that I get
and that I report what I report.
- Nah, we love it.
- Some people don't love it too much.
- [Brad] It's lunch time, and this is
Brad Anderson's lunch break.
I get invited to attend tech events
all the time in Las Vegas,
and whenever I can I like to make
the quick trip from Redmond
and meet with other tech leaders
and learn about what they're doing.
So I got to ask you, you know we were talking about
powers of Silicon Valley.
Given the perspective that you've had
at Microsoft and industry,
was it just like crazy watching that,
and kind of reliving some of it?
- There are very distinct phases
of our industry as you know, and I was,
when the Mac came up in the early 80s
and when Windows started happening in the mid-80s,
I was not a part of the industry,
I was a younger guy at the time,
and I looked in on it from the outside.
And I still do in a way,
although obviously I play some small role today.
When I went back to school for computers,
I thought I missed it.
I missed the great thing.
I missed that awesome time when everything was changing.
- That initial birth.
- And then the internet happened, you know?
- Happened again.
- Right.
And then mobile cloud happened.
And you know what?
It keeps happening, and it's beautiful.
- Yep.
- And so I think that's the coolest thing.
I do look back on those years with great excitement.
I still am very interested in that stuff.
But I love that we're in it today.
It's happening around us,
and the change that we see today
is in many ways even more dramatic.
- It's more interesting than it was 20 years ago.
- Yeah.
It really is.
- And it's changing at a rate that's 10X faster.
- Yeah.
So I don't know if I can be nostalgic about the present,
but it's awesome, right, doing what we do.
- All right, read your story about
when you got in a big disagreement with Bill
- Oh, which one?
- It was something about Powershell versus .NET.
- Oh, WMI versus .NET.
- Oh that's right, WMI versus .NET, I apologize.
- Yeah, so Bill had convinced himself
that your .NET was going to solve everything,
and so he's on this mission to get everyone to use .NET.
So we got in for these management reviews,
okay, so here are the problems, da-da-da,
and he'd be saying,
"You got to rewrite everything in .NET."
And we were just like,
"Well, Bill, you know our hair's on fire,
"and I'm pretty sure a language
"is not going to help with that."
But he just kept, .NET, .NET, .NET,
and it's just like, well.
Anyway, so at some point I learned .NET,
and that was the thing that, you know,
in fact Powershell was originally something called WMIC,
which was WMI-based command line interface,
and so when I started off rewriting that
in .NET to understand it,
and when I did that I realized,
wait, there's a better way to do it.
And that became Powershell.
- And that became it.
- Yeah, so.
- I don't take myself too seriously.
- You can't, yeah.
- Although.
- But it's massive, you know.
I mean it's massive.
- But I do feel a great responsibility, right?
- That's what's said.
- So something even as simple as
I've written a review of a laptop,
somebody comes and says,
"Hey, I bought that laptop.
"It cost $1800."
And then you're gulping for the next sentence,
because it's either going to be
- "I love it"
- "This was the greatest purchase I ever made,
"Thank you very much."
Or, "You are an idiot, and you've just wated my money."
- So you really understand
that when you give a perspective, a recommendation,
people follow it.
- I take it very seriously.
- There's a ton of responsibility with that.
- People will say,
"You've had this device for two weeks,
"how come you haven't reviewed it?"
And I was like, "Really?"
- All right.
- You know, you have to use it.
I do, I take that very seriously.
- Now you said a couple of years ago,
that you know, a couple of years, IT got harder,
but it also got more interesting.
- Yeah.
Yeah it did.
- Tell me more about that perspective.
- Well, how long were we basically running
Windows 2000 and Windows 2003, you know?
We just did the same thing every day,
you came in, you turned on the lights,
you checked for cracked servers.
- Yeah.
- You checked for hard drives,
and it was fairly, honestly, boring.
- Sure.
- The products weren't changing that much.
The business drivers weren't making the products
change all that much.
And we really fell into this universe of
let's just never change anything,
because what we have now works and it's good enough.
And then the cloud happened.
And everyone kind of poo-pood it as a marketing thing.
- Yeah.
- But then people started looking at it and realizing
wow, we don't need to own our email.
We don't need to do, there's all these little places
where we could be offloading
and getting more value out of our IT dollar.
And those things, by the way, are really complicated.
It's hard to move to the cloud in almost any way.
There's a lot of concerns, and you have to be clever,
and that, I think, is what makes it interesting.
I don't think IT is something that you can just show up
because you play Xbox and do well at.
I think you have to be clever.
And you see people at the conferences,
and they're asking hard, interesting questions
about these technologies,
and it's yeah, yeah, yeah,
I get the high level,
I need it to do this one small, precise thing,
and it needs to do it in this way,
and it's fun, it's like a big puzzle to figure that out.
I think we're in a new golden age
that we haven't been in for, since the 90s.
- I'm going to give you the name of one of your books.
- Okay.
- And see if you can guess what it's currently
selling for on Amazon.com.
- Awesome.
All right.
Are negative numbers possible?
- All right.
Projects for Visual Basic 6.
- Wow.
So that was, by the way, an educational title.
It was the, probably third version
of the very first book I ever wrote,
which was the Visual Basic book,
Visual Basic 3 I think.
So I'm going to guess and say,
because of it's strange, rare nature, $4.99.
- Man, you are close.
$3.86.
- Yeah, yeah.
Not much.
- Next one.
Windows Vista Secrets.
- Oh, jeez.
That's not worth anything.
- So I have to ask, you know.
Identity theft is a serious crime.
- Sure.
- You know, Scott Guthrie's shirt here.
- Yeah, well you know it's funny,
you know I've been a distinguished engineer
for quite a long time, and I kept thinking,
boy, what's it take to get technical fellow?
I started wearing these red shirts,
and my career has just skyrocketed.
I don't know what it is.
- Maybe I need to learn from you on that one.
- (laughs)
- So you are just a prolific author.
You've written tons and tons of books.
- Yep.
- I actually went and looked them up on Amazon.
- Wow.
- Now, they're all available,
but they're not priced the same.
- Nope, they're not.
- All right.
So we're going to play a little game here.
I'm going to give you a title of one of your books,
- Oh no.
- And see if you can guess the price
you can get it for today on Amazon.
- Okay.
- Microsoft .NET E-commerce Bible.
- That was my first book.
A dollar.
- Ah.
$37.42.
- Okay, I was close there.
- Yeah, that's like the one that started,
that's the one that launched it.
- It was.
I was actually working at a .COM,
and the book was kind of based on my experiences there,
and we were a Microsoft shop,
so everything was based on ASP,
and we had just started shifting over to .NET,
it was right about when the NET came out.
- That's right.
- They dot-bombed.
No fault of ASP. - (laughs)
- So I got laid off,
and that actually kicked off my career doing consulting.
- That twice.
That's twice where a layoff has led to
fantastic things to you.
- Good things, yeah.
- I guess I'm going to say there's a good lesson in there.
- Yeah, don't be afraid of layoffs.
- That's right.
Don't be afraid of change.
- Well, it's, you know, I think through all that,
just like any other IT pro at that time,
I was jumping jobs every six months or a year or whatever,
and I think I developed kind of the attitude now,
which is, take care of your career,
and you don't need to worry about your job.
- You know, that's really important,
I actually heard one person say one time,
your manager may have significant control of your job,
but you own your career.
- You own your career,
and you have to feed it and take care of it.
And if you do, when you need it, it will be there for you.
- I like that.
- Layoffs aren't scary.
- Look, I am this person,
the kind of old school, PC-focused fogey from the 1990s,
I still approach the world from that perspective,
and I talk about change,
and I preach change,
and I believe in it and I try,
but it's hard sometimes.
- Sure.
- You know, you do get stuck in that.
- Uncomfortable.
- Yeah, and it's just,
you need to embrace that change.
And it's a process, it really is.
I mean, I'll never get work done on an iPad,
I hear this all the time, this is crazy.
They're going to scale this back.
You know, this push has been temporary.
It's going to stop, it's going to go back.
And it's like, guys, no, that's not how the world works.
- Okay, so Jeffrey, so over the last 10 years,
how many autographs do you think you've signed?
- (laughs)
- How many Powershell boxes?
- Quite a few.
But more selfies.
- More selfies.
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.