After almost 14 years, Chee Chew leaves Microsoft and joins Google.
April 6, 2007
Hard to believe but true. It was an extremely hard decision that I battled with for over 2 months. Microsoft has been very good to me and our family, but in the end, I believe it is time to move on. I have many amazing memories over the past 14 years.
2005 (November 13) - 2007 (April): Gaming:
After Windows Mobile, I had the urge to lead a startup. I almost left the company more than once. But Chris Jones pointed me to a new project in J Allard's Xbox org. Code name Panorama. Bring Xbox Live over to Windows. Live Anywhere as we called it at E3 2006. I was employee #1 on the project. We hired 35 people by March 2006, started writing code in April 2006 and by CES (January 2007) we were demoing fully functional code-complete builds. Most importantly of all, we built a great team. They partnered well. They enjoyed work. They had the professional work values I was looking for. We worked hard, but didn't kill ourselves. We overcame impossible obstacles and beat virtually everyone's expectations on how quickly we'd go from 0 to 60 to checkered flag. Thanks for an amazing spin!
1998-2005: Mobile Devices.
The first project was the original IPaq. Pocket PC 2000. Code named: Rapier. We had a small team, but we ripped apart Palm-size PC and put humpty dumpty back together again. We focused on adding very few features, but making all the features easier, faster and more attractive. We doubled the performance on the same piece of hardware. We invested in end to end development, including hardware design. Palm-size PC marketshare was 6% and falling. Palm Pilot owned the market. We were counted out of the market. But when the IPaq released, the world took notice. Pocket PC 2000 achieved 26% marketshare and set us up for eventual success.
Smartphone, Pocket PC Phone Edition, Windows Mobile 5.0.
Palm Treo 700. Codenamed Hendrix. I had the amazing opportunity to help make the Palm+Microsoft partnership. They were great engineering partners in Palm (then PalmOne) such as Celeste Baranski, Mitch Allen, Nancy Gayed, Greg Shirai, Raja Venkataraman, Kiran Prasad and many others (apologies for not listing everyone)... It was a secret partnership for about 2 years. We were Woodstock. They were Snoopy. Together we made Hendrix. We walked careful confidentiality lines using Chocolate builds (images with all Palm proprietary components removed). We negotiated interfaces using creative vague descriptions to preserve IP rights. The engineers had to work around corporate rules, but that made it all the more interesting. When we finally announced the partnership publicly, it was market shifting. Unfortunately we (Microsoft) did not put as much resources behind the partnership as (I believed) we should have to make an even better product.
1995-1998: Internet Explorer.
The Internet Explorer 2 team needed to break the single-threaded engine into a multi-threaded capable engine. I got to check out virtually every file in the project, hack on them all, hold off check-ins for several days while I checked in. Amazing fun for a developer. If you don't understand the thrill, you likely aren't a developer. Paul Andrews describes this and many other IE stories in "How the Web was Won
Internet Explorer 3: We needed a new browser UI frame. We had already created one for the Windows Shell. Due to the unending laziness of all developers, we (Satoshi Nakajima [primarily], Jeremy Stone, I and a few others) decided to reuse the Windows Shell frame. Thus the integration of Windows Shell and the internet namespace.
Internet Explorer 4: The Coolbar. Explorer Bars (Favorites, History, Search, etc).
1993-1995: Windows 95
I had the great fortune to work on the Windows 95 Shell, Taskbar, Desktop, Recycle Bin, and Common Controls (comctl32.dll). I've had the privilege of affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world with my very own bugs. You're welcome.
Thanks for the memories. cheechew@microsoft.com is no more.