Leaving Microsoft
On Monday I announced that I'll be leaving Microsoft on the 31st of August. I've been working at Microsoft for over six and a half years.
I started off in the Speech team working on the speech recognition components in Office XP and then the text-to-speech components in Windows XP. At the same time I also worked on the Speech SDK (SAPI 5.1). After XP shipped I stayed in the Speech team and worked on Microsoft Speech Server for a couple of years. That was an interesting project, I spent most of my time building little speech applications, deploying them on a test server and then picking up a phone to call the server and interact with the application.
After the Speech team I moved to work on Windows Media Center, mostly on the SDK. Media Center was a fun place to work, not least because I got to watch TV and call it work! I worked on three releases of Media Center over three years, with the final release being part of Windows Vista. I'll still continue to use Media Center with an Xbox 360 as an extender after I leave Microsoft, I still think it's a great product.
The next step was moving to the Zune team. I can't talk about what I've been doing though...
So the question is what am I doing next? Well I've accepted a job in the Bay Area for a very interesting company. I think that's all I'll say for now...