Sleepless in Seattle

One of the perks of working at Microsoft is that you get to travel to the US a bit, roughly on a quarterly basis.

So I spent a week in Bellevue with a few hundred other folk for an onboarding event, and although I can’t obviously go into the details, the depth and breatdth of the commitment Microsoft is making towards its cloud strategy is pretty interesting to watch firsthand – all the more so because some of the execs made their way over to address the new hires, and we got to hear their take on current affairs.

The workshops were fun, the roadmap’s shaping up nicely, and I met a whole lot of interesting new people, so despite the grueling flights, intense schedule and ensuing jetlag, I chalk it up as a win.

Getting back is a bit of a pain, though, if only because executing global strategy at a subsidiary requires a bit of adjustment. Pretty much the same as Vodafone, really, except that in that case there was more of a lead.

Anyway, kicking off every day at 8AM meant that there was little time to explore, but that didn’t prevent me from snagging an Apple Watch at $100 off (i.e., the exact same price as a Pebble Round, which further cements my opinion that Pebble needs to rethink their pricing strategy).

I fully expect the watch to be obsolete within a few months, but the price was (almost) reasonable and I expect to get a fair amount of mileage out of it - and it’s got five thousand miles of head start already…

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