I'm not much into spy novels and stuff, but I did watch The Spy Who Came In
"SPY" on the front and back of their clothing. You may have noticed I
haven't taken much care to hide the fact that I work for Microsoft...
I actually discovered this list after browsing for information on
Windows-On-Unix, to help substantiate or refute the (facetious) claim that
in the future, folks will only run Unix so that they can run their favorite
Windows-On-Unix emulator on top.
Hmm. What gets me up in the morning? My children, usually by jumping up and
down on me in bed. ("Daddy! Daddy!"). I usually keep fairly normal hours.
A more serious answer to what motivates me... making great software and
making it available to a really huge market. I think the Microsoft bashers
sometimes forget how much cheaper software is as the result of
concentrating developer resources on a single system platform running on
commodity hardware. I'm (peripherally) involved in the Microsoft's
clustering work, and I think it's going to be really exciting to see how
Microsoft's entry into this market will change the economics. Clusters are
going to get MUCH cheaper and thus much more widely used as a result of
Microsoft. In turn, systems used by middle-level businesses are going to
get much more reliable.
I'm not going to spend my time on this list as a Microsoft chauvinist. But
I've tried to answer seriously what motivates me, and the answer is, cheap
software on cheap hardware, running everywhere, solving problems that would
never get solved if the costs of the software could not be amortized as
broadly as Microsoft can.
Oh, left out my background... graduate student on the Mach project under
Rick Rashid, worked on network shared memory, then on OSF/1 support for the
Intel Multicomputers of the time (Touchstone Delta/XPS/etc.). Followed Rick
out to Redmond. About a year ago, moved South to the Bay Area to work with
Jim Gray.
- Joe
Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/barc/joebar
Phone, Redmond: (206) 936-3837; San Francisco: (415) 778-8227
Pager (100 char max): 1338993@roam.pagemart.net or (800) 864-8444
-----Original Message-----
From: CobraBoy [SMTP:tbyars@earthlink.net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 12:37 PM
To: FoRK
Subject: Re: Fw: subscribe fork-l
At 12:07 PM -0800 1/21/97, Rohit Khare wrote:
>Okey-dokey, but let's give it a chance anyway... feel free to introduce
>yourself to the gang. What's your deal? What makes you get up in the
>morning? go to sleep at night? No, strike that, I would never presume a
>FoRKee would ever sleep at night :-)
>
>And of course, the question you should feel free to weave a real whopper
>about, what do you *do*?
>
>Welcome to the... um.. mob? rabble?... something,
>Rohit
>
>----------
>> From: Joe Barrera <joebar@microsoft.com>
>> To: 'fork-request@w3.org'
>> Cc: Joe Barrera <joebar@microsoft.com>
>> Subject: subscribe fork-l
>> Date: Saturday, January 18, 1997 10:49 PM
>>
>> I don't know you, I'd never heard of you before tonight, but in some
>> cases, that's the best a friendship ever gets.
>>
>> Sign me up, partner.
>>
>> - Joe
Well FoRK must mean something to someone if *they* are sending their spys
out.
Tim
--"Everything I know about Jobs tells me he's as passionate as ever about quality, ease of use and something that utterly eludes most of the Microsoft minions: a flat-out disgust with 'good enough'." Dan Gillmor's San Jose Mercury (21 December 1996):
<> tbyars@earthlink.net <>