Turning 50.
It’s been an unusual week. On December 3 I turned 50. On Dec 8 I
announced that I’m leaving InfoWorld and joining Microsoft. It’s not a
coincidence. When I saw 50 looming, a couple of years ago, I started to
get really clear about what I want to do with the next 25. I’ve been
laying out the vision to anyone who will listen, and I’ll continue to
do so here, but first things first. Yesterday’s announcement left a couple of questions unasked and unaswered, so without further ado:
Q: Are you relocating to Redmond?
A: No. I’ll continue to work from my home office in New
Hampshire. At first I’ll be spending maybe one week in four in Redmond,
because there’s a lot of connecting to do. In the long run I may wind
up traveling almost that much, but I hope to locations elsewhere than
Redmond as often as not.
In January, for example, I’ll be speaking at Techology, Knowledge, and Society in Cambridge UK. And in May, at GOVIS in New Zealand. As was true for my recent talks in Guadalajara and Ann Arbor,
I don’t expect to encounter any Silicon Valley regulars at these
events. I do expect to give and to receive important insights about how
people everywhere can use infotech to further their occupational,
educational, personal, social, and civic agendas.
Q: What will happen to your weblog.infoworld.com/udell archive?
A: I’ve experienced namespace disruption
before, and am very keen to avoid it this time around. Fortunately it’s
in InfoWorld’s best interest to preserve my blog archive. Worst case,
the material will be rehosted because nobody else at InfoWorld uses
Radio UserLand anymore. In that case, I’ve offered to help redirect the
current namespace to a different one. I’m keeping my fingers crossed,
but I hope there won’t be a problem.
Q: Why would you work for them? Not since Standard Oil has such
a brutal vicious rapacious thuggish company with such power existed.
A: That question, in private email from someone I deeply
respect, reminded me that yesterday’s Q and A left some important
things unsaid. In particular, although I mentioned Ray Ozzie and Kim
Cameron and Jean Paoli and Jim Hugunin and JJ Allaire, I egregiously
failed to mention such equally important folks as:
Tim Fahlberg, who wants to use screencasting to reinvent math education,
and who was thrilled that I picked up on his mission and amplified it
in InfoWorld, but who because of that only gained a tiny bit more of
the exposure he deserves.
Dan Thomas, who’s pumping the operational data of city government out onto the web where, despite all my efforts so far, nobody except me sees that it’s there or imagines what to do with it.
Mike Frost, who’s building out a version of the energy web today instead of waiting for government to never do it.
To these stories I’ll add my own NHPR commentaries
about online-map-enabled community work, rediscovery of the local
library, and the social capital we can build when we work from home.
My proposal was to be an evangelist for the Net, to continue
discovering and telling these kinds of stories, and to use them as the
framework within which to explore and explain Microsoft’s current and
emerging technologies.
When I met with Jeff Sandquist I had just finished this podcast
with Jim Russell. It’s a story about migration and the mobility of
intellectual capital, refracted through Jim’s experience with the
Pittsburgh diaspora. Neither Microsoft’s nor any other vendor’s
technologies are discussed. I’m certain that the ideas Jim lays out in
this podcast will inspire new business models for social software, but
it’s all rather speculative.
I explained to Jeff that it had taken me most of a day to interview
Jim Russell, then edit our rambling two-hour discussion down to
something more coherent. And I said: “Reality check, you’re OK with
that?” He said yes. I do not regard that answer as evidence of
thuggishness or rapaciousness. I regard it as a sign of enlightenment,
and I am calibrating my expectations accordingly.
[Jon Udell]
9:41:16 PM 
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