The Secrets of Windows Gurus and Me

I was shocked, flattered and humbled this week when Rob from our StillSecure PR team emailed out to the company our latest press coverage. Included was a cover story by Doug Barney, VP and Editorial Director of Redmond Media Group, a.k.a. Redmond Magazine.

The cover story article titled The Secrets of Windows Gurus was Doug's brainchild idea for exploring how visionaries, technical leaders, entrepreneurs and company founders learn, think and create. I had lunch with Doug earlier this summer when he was cooking up this idea. Doug's been in the industry a while, probably about the same amount of time as I have, and we really enjoyed talking about some of those "old days" milestones. We also discussed the cool work I've been doing with StillSecure and the Cobia team. I shared with Doug some of our future plans and directions and as I recall he was pretty blown away. That's when the conversation turned to Doug's idea for the article.

A month or so later, a questionnaire showed up in my email box from Doug, asking some pretty unusual questions. Stuff like:

Have you ever found inspiration in an odd place?
What is your favorite idea and how did it come to you?
Do you ever take time just to think? If so, where?
How do customers/computer users help you develop ideas?
What’s your sense of Ray Ozzie’s impact on Microsoft?
What have you learned from open source development?

... and a lot more questions, some crazy, all thought provoking.

I had a lot of fun thinking about the responses to Doug's questions. It also was a chance to share some of my views and philosophies about learning. In the article, Dwain Kinghorn, chief strategy and technology  officer for Altiris (Symantec), said something about what he learned in college - that we really more about critical thinking and problem solving vs. the subjects themselves. That very much jives with my experience. I remember by CompSci prof, Stan Compton, telling us; "Everything you learn in college will be outdated in six months. What you need to learn here is how to learn." Oh, how true that turned out to be.

Doug covered some good topics in the article; where do you like to think, the role of customers in the process, and what does the future hold. There are a lot of really great comments and views expressed in this article. I know I really enjoyed reading what some very smart people had to say.

Here's the full list of folks from the article:

David Waugh - Vice President, SharePoint Solutions, Quest Software Inc

Greg Kras -VP of Product Management, Sunbelt Software

Mitchell Ashley - CTO and VP of Customer Experience, StillSecure

Marco Peretti - CTO, BeyondTrust Corp

Tom Kemp - President and CEO, Centrify Corp

Dwain Kinghorn - Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, Altiris

Mark Shavlik - Founder, Shavlik Technologies

Brian Styles - CTO and Founder, ScriptLogic Corp

Alex Bakman - Founder and CTO, Ecora Software Corp

Danny Kim - CTO, FullArmor Corp

Troy Werelius - CEO, Lucid8

Ratmir Timashev - President and CEO, Veeam Software

There's only one problem that I have with the article, Doug's missing. I guess he couldn't including himself so let me do it.

Doug Barney - VP and Editorial Director of Redmond Media Group