Onno's Blog

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Last weekend I was in Boston: an Azure bootcamp event at Microsoft’s R&D center in Cambridge. It took two attempts to get there: our flight Thursday afternoon got canceled and so instead we flew over early Friday morning.

I had been playing with Azure (Microsoft’s cloud computing platform) for a few weeks and this event was a good opportunity to boost that learning effort, hear from other developers what they’re doing with it. The trip proved itself worthwhile within the first half hour with Bill Wilder simplifying the distinction between web roles and worker roles down to one sentence: “a web role is a worker role with IIS enabled”. That’s it. Many of the Azure books manage to fill many a confusing chapter trying to explain the purpose of each.

Some areas of Azure are very impressive: the behind the scenes replication of data for example. Some areas need improvement. Diagnostics for one. The pricing model especially is way too complex. It’s very hard to understand what your real costs are going to be. Some areas are intriguing. The pricing and limitations of SQL Azure versus Azure Table Services: Microsoft seems to want you to use table services where and when you can, and SQL Azure only when you really have to. I suspect their reasoning is somewhat similar to Google with GAE and BigTable: the ability to do optimizations behind the curtain.

Friday evening Mark and I had dinner at Villa Francesca, a very nice Italian seafood restaurant in North End. Together with the dinner with Rich the next evening at Blue Room in Cambridge it made me think whether it is time to move back to a real city. I like living in Rochester (or Webster to be precise) but the culinary scene is not the same…

Originally Rich and I planned to have dinner on Thursday. Saturday evening I had hoped to meet up with several of my fellow Sun alumni but that didn’t come together. I sent out an email invite a few days before. I do this as well during visits back to Amsterdam and California: proposing an evening and checking who’s available. This always works out in those two locations but here it failed miserably. Not one positive response, just two declines. I am quite disappointed about that. However, in the end still had a great evening. As I didn’t make it to Boston until Friday morning, Rich and I moved our dinner to the Saturday evening.

My flight Sunday wasn’t until 5pm so I had much of the day to be a tourist. From the hotel I first walked over to MIT’s campus near Cambridge Center. Lovely new architecture. From there back to Charles river, across Longfellow Bridge zigzagging through the little streets until I came to Boston Common. From there down State Street down to the wharf admiring the old stores converted into beautiful apartments. Then zigzagging through North End back past the Museum of Science to Cambridge and the hotel. With stops at Starbucks and Boston Beerworks as needed. The photographic proceeds of the hike are in the gallery.

At the airport I learned that the flight back to Rochester was delayed. I checked the FlightTrack app on my iPhone: this flight gets canceled 17% of the time. That’s high. Hmmm. US Airways pushes back the departure time at 20 minute intervals. I hate that. It locks you down at the gate. In the end we boarded two hours late. I much prefer that they tell me straightaway that the delay will be that. Then I can go do something: have a drink, have dinner, or just leisurely wander about. Back in Rochester it was much colder than in Boston, making searching for sweater and rain jacket the first order of business.

I had planned a different post, the trip to Boston last weekend, but that will have to wait.

I didn’t really know much about Apple, or had heard of Steve Jobs, until 1987 when my employer at the time, KMG, merged with Peat Marwick. We were an MS-DOS firm, they were an Apple shop. A calculation was made and it was decided it was cheaper to rewrite our DOS programs for Macintosh. The next couple of years we had a blast learning about and developing Mac apps. And getting drawn into the Apple culture.

I attended my first Apple developer conference in 1989 in San Jose. My first trip to the US. The registration lines for the conference were long, stretched out way outside the convention center. People were grumpy, I was grumpy. Finally we got inside and into the main hall. We were delighting in complaining to each other about how Apple got this wrong, the long way we traveled to get here, the …. The lights dim, the music swells and on the two enormous screens the 1984 commercial starts playing: “and you will know why 1984 won’t be like 1984!”

Oh we knew.

Gone were the complaints about the long line, the long wait outside. We were going to change the world one person at the time!

Since that event I believed. I knew two things. I wanted to live in Silicon Valley and I wanted to work for Apple. It took some years to fulfill this dream but it came true. With the help of Jeroen in 1993 I landed a job with Apple in the UK. With the help of my manager Kate I secured a transition to Cupertino in January 1997.

Before all that happened I read John Scully’s Odyssey, his story about his journey as CEO of Apple. Which is how I got to learn about Steve and the characters that built the first Macintosh: Bill Atkinson, Andy Herzfeld, Chris Espinosa and many others.

It changed my life. I wanted to strive for the best, be uncompromising, to impact, inspire and change lives of those within my reach, build the most beautiful things I can. Care about how I view me and not how others view me.

My move to Cupertino in January was just after Apple acquired NeXT, or as the inside joke went, NeXT acquired Apple. I was the product manager for OpenDoc. I knew quickly this wasn’t to last long and indeed in March Apple laid me off. A little before I met Steve. He asked me what I was working on. I stuttered and stumbled. I didn’t make an impression but he did.

I moved on to work for Sun and then on relocating to Rochester eventually returning back to the profession of software engineer and joining Odyssey Software.

I wish to be able to call Steve Jobs a friend but I can’t. That’s okay. I am content knowing that I knew him and that he impacted my life.

Think differently. Be insanely great.