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Family History
Wines Photography Books |
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TheRagens Wine Tastings
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Over the course of my career at Microsoft, I have published a number of articles and papers. Generally, these have been coincided with different phases as my responsibilities have moved across several different areas. This first set of papers were written when I was a product manager for Windows NT. These are fairly deep technical pieces on some of the capabilities of Windows NT that stretched the boundary of what most people thought could be done with a PC. For example, real-time systems require a level of predictable responsiveness that Windows NT could provide (within limits) if written to properly. Similarly, 3-D graphics capabilities at the time were the almost exclusive domain of very expensive UNIX workstations. The fact that Windows NT could do these things was something that we wanted to talk about as I wanted to stake out the engineering and scientific workstation market for Windows NT.
In my next position, I shifted from product management to being an industry manager -- Microsoft's version of a vertical marketing person. In this role, it was my objective to position all of Microsoft's products as they applied to a particular vertical market. In this case, I didn't move that far as I was working on the engineering market. The majority of my focus was still on winning the platform although I now had the ability to use more tools (like integration with Microsoft Office) as a way to improve overall engineering productivity.
Soon, I was given the opportunity to shift to the Customer Relationship Management market. Rather than a vertical, this was a software application market that we called horizontal as it is a business function that crossed every single vertical. This was also much broader in scope. No longer was this primarily a struggle to win the operating system. Now, I really had to think of the entire range of products that Microsoft offered from operating system (handheld, desktop, and server) to database servers to Internet services to productivity applications. |
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