Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog:
“[When I worked at Microsoft,] I was given a badge that allowed me entry to all but a few of the Microsoft buildings. One of the things that caught my eye was a large grid on the wall of a hallway in the building that housed the engineers that worked on Windows Media Player—building 50, on the 2nd or 3rd floor.
“The grid was labeled across the top with A, B, C, etc., and down the left with 1,2,3, like a game of Battleship. The grid was made of 8.5×11-inch pages, landscape orientation, showing color screenshots from Apple’s iTunes software. Each sheet was a different screen of the application: each tab of a preference panel, each info window, everything.
“Around the corner was another grid, showing the RealPlayer application. This grid was the same: grid A1 was the front user view of the application, mirroring what was on the iTunes wall/grid.
“Around the next corner was *another* grid, this one showing Windows Media Player version 9 !! This one was missing a few tiles in the grid, but you could actually see the progress as each feature [of iTunes and RealPlayer] was copied, square for square.
“Amazing. New software is put out, a manager sees it and decides that the creative part of their day is making color screen captures of the software and presenting it to the copying—er, engineering team.”
1:49 AM
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