But I don’t even speak Japanese!!!

In case you’re wondering why I don’t have all of the new cool spaces stuff on my space such as the sponsored links and book lists, its because, well, I can’t.

Since I created my space sooooo long ago, when it was only available in Japan, my space has been marked as "Japanese", so I can’t use the features that are English only at present. Working to get this fixed…stay tuned for ways to make me money.

Spaces 10.5 is Live!

Ok, so I didn’t do any actual work on this particular release of Spaces, but I’m pretty darn exited. There are a whole bunch of new features in this release which I think will get more people using the product.

XBox 360 & Live

You can now add your XBox Live gamer tag to your space. It will show your visitors your gamer score as well as recently played games.

We’ve also added a bunch of XBox 360 themes.

Show me the money!

Wish you could make some money with your space? Choose our new Sponsored Links module or create a book list with Amazon affiliate integration so you can get paid when visitors follow your links/recommendations! <sentence stolen from Jay>

Size isn’t everything…

We’ve shrunk the URLs! You can get to your smace now without the "members" part. You can get to this space via http://jeffsteinbok.spaces.msn.com or http://spaces.msn.com/jeffsteinbok.

There are a whole bunch more things too, and you can get details at the SpaceCraft. And yes, we know there are bugs and some other issues, so please don’t go ranting in the comments here.

Talking about Parking gone wild at Microsoft!

Trevin brings up a good issue here. In fact, we had a virtual company meeting today, and Bill and Steve mentionned the space issue specifically, and that perhaps we didn’t see the problem coming far enough in advance.

I do agree that moving Passport wasn’t great for the team, but I don’t know if there’s an easy way to pick a team to move. Without shuffling the whole campus, you have to move teams based mostly on how big each team is.

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Parking gone wild at Microsoft

I never thought I’d actually blog about this, but parking and overall office space is getting crazy at Microsoft (Looks like Omar coincidentally commented on this as well)

We recently moved from the Redwest-D to Building 119 based on a criteria that is a complete mystery to everyone on our team. They couldn’t have picked a worse team to move due to our close tie with all the other MSN and Windows Live teams (which are still in the Redwest campus) — I have to drive back to Redwest at least twice a day for meetings. I think I’m getting 5mpg in my car right now on average.

While we were in Redwest you could sense an office space issue cropping up over the last 2 years. More people were getting doubled up with contractors sometimes seen quadrupled up! The only thing that saves you from the dreaded "office mate" is your senority at the company relative to the rest of the peeps on your team. I’ve had my own office for nearly 2 years now, so let’s hope I don’t move to a team like Windows anytime soon with 12+ year veterans. Otherwise i’ll find myself sharing an office with 4 interns.

The office space situation isn’t nearly as bad as the parking is getting. As soon as we moved to 119, i quickly realized that we had a problem. If you don’t arrive before 10am, you are pretty much out of luck. You will drive around for 10-15 mins, then realize that you have to go park in a parking lot for another building then trek back to our building. If you need to go to another building for a meeting not in the immediate vicinity, you don’t dare take your car. If you do, and try to come back, your spot will be gone (little did you know, your spot was gone 4.3 secs after you drove out of it).

The other day I made the mistake of taking my car when I went off-site for lunch. When I came back, not only were all parking spots taken, but all the illegal ones AND handicapped spots were taken too! Our parking security must have killed several rainforests with the amount of "parking tickets" that were written and tow trucks were out in full force — i even saw a car get towed last night at 10:45pm.

This isn’t happening at only our building, but also lots of other buildings in the redmond campus. It’s sheer insanity. I now have to 2 things which are crazy to me: (1) actively manage my parking spot and (2) keep my exchange inbox < 200MB (we’ll save #2 for a future rant).

Thankfully, Microsoft has recently snatched up the nearby Safeco buildings for a cool $209 million. Back in 2004, Microsoft bought the 20-acre Eddie Bauer buildings for $38 million. Lastly, we expanded into office space recently vacated by Cingular Wireless at Redmond Town Center.

While this all sounds like good news to solve our space issues, I have my doubts:

1. How fast will we be moving teams there? How building renovation are we doing?

2. How will they decide what teams to move? Will it move another Identity Services-like team and shaft them in the process making them commute between buildings more?

3. If we continue to hire at the rate we are (we’ve certainly hired several thousand

MacWorld 2006 KeyNote

Why can’t we (Microsoft) do something like this? Every year, Steve Jobs gets up at MacWorld in San Francisco and delivers a keynote address. They all run very similarly to the one before; financial results, new products in music, pc, etc… And every year, Apple has had its best year ever and seems to be delivering the best products on the market!

This year, it was all about the Intel-based Macs and how they got them done nearly six months ahead of schedule. Now, I’m not trying to knock Apple’s achievements; they’ve done some pretty cool stuff over the past few years, but so have a lot of other companies. Seems to me that we don’t know how to self-promote as well as we should.

When you see Bill Gates get up and do a keynote, its just not as exciting as watching Steve Jobs do it, even if Bill is showing off much cooler and more visionary stuff. I remember watching a talk Jobs did back in October when he was talking for 20 mins or so about iSight, which honestly, isn’t rocket science, but he made it sound so cool and ahead of the curve. Whereas Microsoft talkes about Media Center PC, and all these cool new scenarios, and we make them seem dull.

The one thing definitely worth drooling over at this year’s MacWorld would be the new MacBooks (intel-based PowerBooks). They’re sick. Under an inch thick, with a built in video camera, and amazing screen.

You can watch the keynote here.