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Leaving Microsoft… for MSNBCMarch 6th, 2006 by Hans Bjordahl :: see related comic |
Change is in the air. I’ve joined MSNBC as a group manager on the MSNBC.com technology team.
Granted, a move from Microsoft to MSNBC (a separate but closely associated company) isn’t all that far : ) , but I can tell you after two short weeks on the ground at MSNBC that it already feels like I’ve covered many, many miles.
The opportunity was appealing to me for a lot of reasons. I’ve been a news junkie since day one; as a kid, devouring the local paper (starting with the comics of course) was a highlight of my day. I was a journalism major in college, but took a technical path after graduation that found me in the thick of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust.
Today I devour the daily papers online, and in the face of an accelerating shift in how people get their news, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to move right into the industry’s sweet spot. Adding to the appeal was the fact that this is a fast-track, A-list team with a lot of ambitious leaders who are rapidly reengineering MSNBC.com to take full advantage of everything NBC has to offer on the broadcast side and everything Microsoft has to offer on the technology side, all in the interest of delivering the best possible news experience online.
Is it working? I’ll quote you some recent figures: In November 2005, MSNBC.com drew 22.3 million unique visitors and, for the tenth straight month, topped all other broadcast and cable news Web sites including CNN.com, according to Nielsen//Net Ratings. In the six months prior, MSNBC.com averaged 24 million monthly unique visitors, more than the unique visitors for ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com and FOXNews.com combined. To quote the technical term, that’s “hugetastic.”
I very much enjoyed my nearly five years working with the Microsoft Outlook team, especially as the “calendar guy,” but the Outlook release is in good hands as it enters its final glide path to shipping. This new opportunity, meanwhile, finds me back in “Web time” on a very ambitious team at the cutting edge of an industry I know and love.
Would a news junkie like me pass up an opportunity to be a part of that? Not a chance.
Oh, and by the way, MSNBC.com is hiring.
Congrats on the job move, and good luck! I hope you’re still going to publish your comic?
Perhaps there will be a distant off spring of Where the Buffalo Roam? I was an avid reader of the Colorado Daily growing up, WTBR always had me rolling. Tech humor is great, but there’s so much other material out there right now.
Best wishes.
All the best for the new role. Seems like the news junkie in you is gonna really have a great time there!
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For the next several episodes of “The .NET Show”…
Jenna Adorno
JobsBlog’s cartoon images and title bar are provided by Hans Bjordahl. See more…
Jim Stroud
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Bug Bash
Excited to find that the MS-internal comic strip Bug Bash is
Bug Bash
Excited to find that the MS-internal comic strip Bug Bash is now available to the masses…
Hopefully your ratings will be better than the networks’!
You might also want to drop a line to fellow Buffalo and KUCB alum Carl Quintanilla who’s an MSNBC/CNBC reporter.
Cheers,
Ken
Bug Bash is a comic strip written and illustrated by Hans Bjordahl. Bug Bash is a comic strip about technology: managing technology, the business of technology. It's about project management and managing projects through the dull world of Rational Rose, use cases, and requirements. Functional requirements, user requirement, functional specifications, design specifications, call it what you want but it's still the bane of project managers. And when you're done with that, you can think about all the fun that comes with timelines, scheduling, estimates (PERT estimation anyone?) and resourcing until Gantt charts are coming out of your ears. Let's not forget the risk management in the software engineering life cycle. Maintaining the project is just as much fun, managing what was initially set out in requirements and trying to keep feature creep / scope creep in check with change management. If any of these words send nightmares to you, the project manager, then this site probably rings true with you. (Who Links Here?)