April 2013
1 post
How I found Google
I still remember how I first heard of Google.com. Back in high school, I was reading an interview with Sabeer Bhatia where he was asked about his relationship with Aishwarya Rai (there were a few rumors back then). In the interview, he turned to Google.com to see who was talking about them. I had never heard of Google before then so I when I could go online again, I went to Google.com and had my...
March 2013
1 post
December 2012
1 post
Microsoft pressing Apple to take a smaller cut →
Six/seven years ago, I walked up to a very senior Microsoft executive during an exec retreat and asked him why the company was so obsessed with competing against Google.
He thought for a second and said “Because advertising may be the only way to monetize products in the future and we don’t want to ever go through a competitor to sell Office”.
Whether or not it was an...
January 2012
1 post
2011->2012
2011 was a weird year.
Aarthi & I got featured in the NYTimes which was great because my mom got to see my photo in the paper back in India (the New York Times gets syndicated everywhere). I believe every visitor to my mom’s house in Chennai still gets shown a clipping.
Worked on some very interesting things in the cloud space. Also got to run multiple teams for the first time at...
December 2011
2 posts
“bubblegum has all the cool filters and social options iOS and Android users have...”
– Bubblegum just got ranked one of the top 15 mobile apps of 2011 by Mashable.
On Carmack and Cutler
Update: See Carmack’s response to this post.
I wanted to post this as a comment on this thread about John Carmack on HN
John Carmack is one of my heroes in the tech world. Not because of his technical accomplishments and helping to create games that I’ve spent years of my life on. But for his single minded obsession with his craft after two decades. Every time he is on stage, he is...
September 2011
2 posts
A replacement for email
I sent out mail at work by mistake today which misspelt ‘public’ as ‘pubic’. I knew it the moment I had hit send but I couldn’t stop the sending quickly enough. Of course, we all had a laugh about it but it got me thinking about how archaic email was as a medium when compared to what I’m used to with Facebook, Google+, Twitter or any modern discussion app.
...
Don't be so f*king strategic
One of the occupational hazards of working at Microsoft was attending offsites. These were 2-3 day affairs, typically cloistered watching endless sessions of Powerpoint in a out-of-the-way Washington resort with a bunch of execs. At one such shindig I was attending a few years ago, one of the attractions was a talk from a couple of external speakers, both of them local VCs. The talk was covering...
