In the unlikely event that anyone was looking for me specifically, I hope you were successful.  I spent most of my time at or near the Metro Style Apps booth, which was fairly front-and-center in the Expo hall.  As I didn’t have a session of my own to present, my primary purpose was to answer questions and demo different pieces of the Windows 8 user experience upon request.  Because of this, I took to identifying myself as a “booth babe” when asked about my role at the conference.

Of course, my other primary purpose was to support my colleagues who were presenting.  Most relevant in this regard would be the talk given by Priya Vaidyanathan, the primary PM for the Windows 8 Search experience.  As the primary dev for this feature I was very excited to attend Priya’s excellent presentation (“Search: Integrating into the Windows 8 search experience”) and to help her address attendees’ questions afterward.  If you’re at all interested in how the search experience works in Windows 8, or would like to know how your app can add value to it, I highly recommend watching the video.

Other great session videos:

• Jensen Harris’ brilliant “big picture talk” from the first day: 8 traits of great Metro style apps.
• My friend and fellow SVC team member David Washington explains how to build great support for different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and DPIs.
• SVC team PM Lead Ed Averett gives an overview of how to build great “gallery” Metro style apps.
• Many, many more at the Channel 9 Build 2011 site.

Misc //Build Links

• Fellow “Metro Style Apps” booth babe Raymond Chen shared some notes about his experience at the conference, including documentation of a few of our booth antics.
• Cori Drew’s blog series “My week at //Build/” – unfortunately I didn’t get to meet Cori but her write-up is a great read!

I’m (seriously) overjoyed to say that I will there representing my team along with a few of our Program Managers.  If you will be attending, feel free to track me down and say hi.  I’ll post some updates about my schedule here when I’m at liberty to do so, and will also post (and tweet) some links which I expect many of you following along from home will want to check out.

In the meantime, the event website and Twitter account are probably the best places to watch for official details and updates about the event.

It’s going to be an exciting week!

The new “B8″ blog is making this a tradition with a post titled Introducing the Team, and I decided I should do the same.  So before I say any more, any guesses about which team from the list is mine?

If you guessed “Search, View, and Command” then you guessed right!

You’re also right if you guessed that this is an evolution of the Find & Organize team from Windows 7.  However, the new is far from a simple rebranding of the old.  In fact, I would estimate that only about half of our team’s roster can be traced back to F&O.  Along the same lines, our charter has evolved as well.  More about that another day

Stay tuned for the B8 blog to learn more about our team and the work we’re doing.  You can follow @BuildWindows8 on Twitter to get notified about the latest updates.

MS trivia: Our team is commonly abbreviated as “SVC,” which has on occasion caused some confusion.  That’s because the SVC abbreviation has long been used to refer to the Silicon Valley Campus down in Mountain View, CA.  Our team’s offices are in Redmond, WA.

Yes, that’s their e-bill notification (the only thing you get) being flagged as “very suspicious.”

Their solution?  Tell customers to ignore the warnings and add their address to your e-mail service’s “allow list.”  According to the customer service rep, it’s been this way for years.  How hard can this be to correct?  If anything, I would think bills like this should be using SenderID to make the mail *more* trustworthy, not doing whatever they’re doing that looks “very suspicious.”

In contrast, this is how they *should* make their bills appear:

And as of Wednesday we have finally shared a first glimpse at what we are (for now) calling Windows 8!

Here are three videos from Wednesday:

Jensen Harris’ overview video

Here’s a video of our group’s director of program management, Jensen Harris, giving an overview of some of the new user experience we’ve built.

Steven Sinofsky on-stage at D9

That video was posted just after our division president, Steven Sinofsky, gave an interview and on-stage demo (with VP Julie-Larson Green).

Video here (no embedding available)

Mike Angiulo at Computex

Finally, one of my favorite presenters, Corporate Vice President Mike Angiulo, demonstrates “Windows 8” at partner preview event in Taipei, Taiwan, for COMPUTEX.

I found the ads hilarious and edgy.

I also found them thought-provoking because the issues they highlighted are important ones which people (myself included) often take for granted. The fact that ad was jarring was, in my opinion, it’s brilliance. It made me laugh, and then feel bad and thoughtful about the fact that I laughed. You see, my brain had filed these issues in the “past” category, the sort of thing you get used to seeing used in this sort of humor.  When was the last time you heard anyone talk about Tibet or the rainforest?  Seeing these ads made me realize these things are still happening and jarred my brain into realizing its mistake.  And with any luck, correcting it.

Mission accomplished, I think.

I can’t (and don’t particularly care) to comment on the intelligence of Kruzweil, I’ll leave the defense of his honor to the ready and willing.  Instead I want to share an alternative interpretation of what Kruzweil meant.  Or at least some food for thought about what seems to me a fascinating subject.

Myers makes a lot of great points about why it would be difficult (within 10 years) to simulate all the detailed biological interactions between cells in the brain.  He also focuses a lot on a claim Kurzweil apparently made about the potentially small size of the computer program in question, based on the assertion that Kurzweil was only talking about “data” in the genome and that this is not sufficient for building a simulator of brain biology.

But when I read the Kurzweil quote, a simulator of brain biology is not at all what came to mind.  Indeed, reading Myers’ argument had me scratching my head, since it took me a moment or two to realize what he was on about.  You see, I read Kurzweil’s quote from the perspective of a software engineer, whereas Myers’ interpreted it as a biologist would see fit to do.  This is a reasonable thing given that he is indeed a biologist.  What seems less reasonable to me is how vigorously he attacks Kruzweil’s claim without giving the acknowledgement that he’s made an awful lot of potentially incorrect assumptions about what Kurzweil actually meant.

So what is my software engineers’ perspective? 

I don’t see why reverse engineering the brain would require any ability to simulate protein and brain cell interactions.  Doing so would be a brilliant achievement, but it seems orthogonal to the idea as I understood it.  Myers says:

To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

In my opinion this is not only wrong, but incredibly harsh.

It’s wrong because I think of biology itself as the programming language, and perhaps also the runtime.  If a C++ developer were asked to reverse-engineer a program written in Pascal, they would not have to learn Pascal (or worse yet, reverse-engineer the compiler and runtime) in order to create a functionally identical C++ program.  So I believe it could be with the biology and the functionality of the brain.

I understood Kurzweil’s statement to be about the creation of a computer program (in some existing, modern programming language) which implements at least a rudimentary version of the human brain’s algorithm.  For example, its ability to continously observe input and recognize patterns, resulting in emergent properties that make up at least part of what we call consciousness.  That’s why I think “reverse engineering” seems like an appropriate description, while “simulation” does not.

I won’t claim that this is what Kurzweil meant.  He may have meant exactly what Myers claims he did.  But I have the feeling Myers didn’t give this subject due consideration before lambasting Kurzweil over the supposed ridiculousness of his claim.

Bickering aside, what do you think of this subject?  Can we reverse engineer intelligence/consciousness or at least some fundamental components?  Will we have true “brain simulators” any time soon?  I’m  not remotely qualified to answer such questions, but I’m inclined to share Kurzweil’s optimizism and ambition about at least the former.

Framing the discussion and defining terms
Ebert devotes a large (indeed perhaps the largest) portion of the article to a vain attempt at defining the term “art.”  Crucially, he neglects to define the other half of the equation he proposes: “video game.”  This is not to say that Ebert doesn’t have a definition, indeed it seems he does.  Instead I’d like to point out his unwillingness to share it with us or court any kind of consensus about it.  Ebert says:

Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This seems either disingenous or daft.  He quite nearly states that a video game cannot be art because if it were to be art, it would cease to be a video game.  It is unfortunate that Ebert did not elaborate on what he believes constitutes a video game.  I believe this is the most interesting angle from which to approach the issue, in contrast to his approach of attempting to define art, failing, and then sneaking in an easily contested definition for a different term which turns his argument into a tautology.

A video game’s purpose
Ebert seems to imply that a video game’s purpose is to have “points” and to be “won,” dismissing any value in the associated experience.  My question to Mr. Ebert is then: what is the purpose of a book?  Is it not simply to be read according to a set of rules?  Surely one can’t go about reading page 42, then page 12, then page 100.  This would violate the rules which stipulate you begin on the first page and continue, in sequence, to the last one.  One could then argue that by following these rules and ultimately reading the last page, you have “won” the book.  Perhaps if the book contains 400 pages, we could consider those to be “points.”

No one would argue that the ordering of the pages, the rules for navigating the book’s content, is likely to be artistic.  I am thus confused why Ebert fixates on the fact that video games have an end and some mechanism to guide you from start to finish.  Many other artistic mediums have such things.

I propose that the distinguishing characteristic of a video game versus, say, a film – is interactivity.  Both share many of the same artistic elements: visuals, narrative, storytelling mechanics, acting, musical scores, and so on.  However films and books are not interactive.  That is, they do not adapt to input from the viewer.  They are static.

If Ebert would like to separate the notion of an interactive film from a video game, then I invite him to make such an argument.  However, I must note that such a redefinition would inevitably result in the reclassification of existing content.  I would have no hesitation in proposing that Mass Effect is an interactive film at least as much as it is a video game.  There’s no getting around the fact that much of the content we have today fits into both of those classifications (and perhaps others, if you wish to invent them).  Halo is undeniably a video game, and the multiplayer aspect is arguably nothing else.  But the campaign is about experiencing the story rather than achieving victory.  Just like a film or a novel, you cannot lose Halo.  You can only stop before you reach the end.

Parts versus the whole
Regardless of whether a video game itself can constitute art, it seems obvious that they can contain it.  Game developers employ artists to create art for their games.  This extends far beyond visuals.  The musical score for Halo, for instance, is phenomenal in its own right.  The same can be said of film.  So how does a film become art?  Do we measure the sum of its artistic components?  The artistry of its music?  Of its narrative?  Do we critique the performances of its actors?  Video games have all of these same elements, which themselves I believe Mr. Ebert will agree can be art.  So I ask, Mr. Ebert, what do you believe elevates a particular film to be worthy of being called art?  Is it the sum of the artistic value of its elements?  Is that sum orthogonal to the artistic value of the film itself?  Or must that sum meet some threshold which allows it to be considered, yet not be enough on its own to merit awarding the title?

Argument from ignorance
Ebert disappoints me by confessing that he has no firsthand experience with the medium, let alone with highly regarded specific examples.  This seems rather like an illiterate person trying to explain to me why Shakespeare wasn’t an artist.  Even if he stumbles upon a fair point, he’s not likely to frame it with anything I’d call insightful.  Ebert’s failure to recognize the importance of defining video games likely stems from this ignorance, and not from any ill will or intellectual ineptitude.  If that illiterate man had been explained the purposes of recipe books and instruction manuals, and then asked whether or not he thought books were a form of art, I wonder what he would say.

Kellee offered to provide Ebert with a Playstation 3 system to experience a game called Flower.  I am not familiar with this game, but I have some more mainstream recommendations to make.  I already mentioned Mass Effect and Halo, two of my favorite game series which each create massive (and ever-expanding) universes with engaging stories, deep and memorable characters, and top-notch performances from their respective voice actors.  I could recommend many others, but for someone familiar with the world of film, these may prove particularly enlightening.

What do you think?
Do you have an opinion on the subject?  Did I get something wrong?  Do you have an example you think is the epitomy of art from the video game industry?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t live up to their promise.

The Investigation

I started out by reading up a bit on both devices.  I read complaints about performance on the Nook, but also saw mention that an update was released which improved the situation significantly.  The specs told me that the Nook was slightly thicker and ever so slightly heavier, but otherwise roughly the same dimensions and basic capabilities.  In theory the color touch screen and Android-powered nature of the device made it appealing.  In theory.

So one afternoon I took a drive over to the B&N store in Bellevue to take a good look at the Nook in-person.  My first impression was that the industrial design looked cheap compared to the Kindle 2 I’d seen.  I played around with the device a bit, and found the page-turning speed acceptable but not exactly impressive.  Navigating the device’s various functions seemed relatively cumbersome, but I didn’t have a basis to compare this to the Kindle at the time.

As I was looking at the demo device on display, a salesperson asked if I needed help and tried to tell me how much they’d like to get a Nook of their own.  I inquired about the return policy, and was told to wait while they called down a manager to talk to me about the device.  The manager (or supervisor, or whatever she was) was very enthusiastic about the device, but I was put off a bit by her pitch.  First, she told me there was a 15% restocking fee if I returned the device (I forget if it was a 14-day or 30-day return policy).  She said this was “standard for these kind of electronics” to which I replied that the Kindle did not have such a fee and neither did stores like Best Buy and Fry’s.  I also inquired whether there was a web browser on the device, and she said “no but the Kindle doesn’t have one either.”  I pointed out that the Kindle actually does have a basic browser, and she insisted it was only the Kindle DX which offered this feature.  Of course, I quickly confirmed using my Droid that she was indeed incorrect.

Given all this, I decided to leave B&N without one, and a couple days later I ordered a Kindle.

The Arrival

I ordered the Kindle late on a Thursday evening, and decided to take advantage of Amazon’s same-day delivery option, a concept which nearly blew my mind, to have it arrive on Friday.  Sure enough, it arrived at my building Friday afternoon.

Unpacking the Kindle is a delightful experience.  The device arrives pre-programmed with your Amazon account.  There was no registration process of any kind, it was as if this device knew me and was anxious to be my new reading companion.  The Kindle store was already populated with book recommendations based on my Amazon history, and the device happily sync’d the two books I’d purchased on the Kindle for iPhone app a few months before.

I was immediately glad I’d chosen this over the Nook.  Amazon had clearly put significant effort into building a complete end-to-end experience with minimal friction to purchasing and reading books or other content.  In some respects, it even seemed they’d outdone Apple, who many consider to be the king of this kind of execution.

The device looks and feels solid.  The plastic feels more expensive and higher quality than that of the Nook.  The size and weight are pretty much ideal for its purpose.  The button placement is well thought-out, and the labels make it trivial to pick up and start using.  They duplicate certain buttons (like “Next Page”) and seem to have considered all the different ways you might hold the device when reading on a park bench, in bed, etc.

Navigating the device may not be as delightful as an iPhone, but it’s easy to figure out and get around.  Common tasks are easy, what feels a little clunkier are secondary tasks like selecting text within a document – but it’s still easier than it seemed on the Nook.

The display updates slightly faster for page-turns than the Nook, which seems just fast enough to not be annoying when reading.  That is, the Nook is only marginally slower, but it seems to cross a threshold where it starts to feel slow.

Web Browser

The Kindle web browser is very basic, and given the performance characteristics of the hardware and lack of a pointer, it’s not hard to see why.  Typical web browsing tasks simply won’t work on this hardware.  That said, I think the basic browser is quite useful, and mainly for one application: Google Reader.  Now, to be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time actually using this in practice… but the short time I did spend using it, it felt quite usable and useful.  I imagine I will use that regularly in the future, unlike most any other web browsing functionality.

One gripe with the browser was the inability to re-order bookmarks.  Or at least, if you can re-order them, I couldn’t figure it out.  Instead I had to delete all the built-in bookmarks (about a dozen) which is a slow enough process, just to get Google Reader to be at the top.  Given that the browser is labeled as an “experimental” feature at this point, I can’t really complain too much.

Verdict

At this point I’m pretty confident I’ll be keeping the Kindle.  At first I thought maybe an iPad or similar slate PC might obsolete it, but now I’m not so sure.  The iPad, for example, is about twice the weight of the Kindle.  I don’t think that’s going to be comfortable for extended reading sessions.  Once I get to try an iPad myself I’ll try to update this post with my impressions with regard to its usefulness as a book reader.  Until then, I’m happy to recommend the Kindle to any avid readers or gadget freaks.

In Windows 7, the folks building the Task Manager performance tab tried to make it a little easier to understand the usage of physical memory on your system.  The most interesting bits are here:

What do these values tell us?

- We are looking at a machine with 4GB of physical memory installed.

- 71% of that physical memory is currently in use by applications and the system.

- That leaves 29% of memory “available”, despite the indication that only 16MB of physical memory is totally “free.”

Here’s a description of the four labels, from the bottom:

Free – This one is quite simple.  This memory has nothing at all in it.  It’s not being used and it contains nothing but 0s.

Available – This numbers includes all physical memory which is immediately available for use by applications.  It wholly includes the Free number, but also includes most of the Cached number.  Specifically, it includes pages on what is called the “standby list.”  These are pages holding cached data which can be discarded, allowing the page to be zeroed and given to an application to use.

Cached – Here things get a little more confusing.  This number does not include the Free portion of memory.  And yet in the screenshot above you can see that it is larger than the Available area of memory.  That’s because Cached includes cache pages on both the “standby list” and what is called the “modified list.”  Cache pages on the modified list have been altered in memory.  No process has specifically asked for this data to be in memory, it is merely there as a consequence of caching.  Therefore it can be written to disk at any time (not to the page file, but to its original file location) and reused.  However, since this involves I/O, it is not considered to be “Available” memory.

Total – This is the total amount of physical memory available to Windows.

Now, what’s missing from this list?  Perhaps, a measurement of “in use” memory.  Task Manager tells you this in the form of a percentage of Total memory, in the lower right-hand corner of the screenshot above.  71%, in this case.  But how would you calculate this number yourself?  The formula is quite simple:

Total – Available = Physical memory in use (including modified cache pages).

If you plug in the values from my screenshot above, you’ll get:

4026MB – 1150MB = 2876MB

This matches up with the 71% calculation.  4026 * .71 = 2858.46MB.

Recall that this number includes the modified cache pages, which themselves may not be relevant if you are trying to calculate the memory “footprint” of all running applications and the OS.  To get that number, the following formula should work

Total – (Cached + Free) = Physical memory in use (excluding all cache data).

On the example system above, this means:

4026MB – (1184 + 16) = 2826MB

By looking at the difference between these two results, you can see that my laptop currently has 50MB worth of disk cache memory pages on the modified list.

So what is “commit?”

Earlier I said that measuring physical memory usage has been tricky in the past, and that the labels used in Windows haven’t necessarily helped matters.  For example, in Windows Vista’s Task Manager there is a readout called “page file” which shows two numbers (i.e 400MB / 2000MB).  You might guess that the first number indicates how much page file is in use, and the second number indicates the amount of disk space allocated for use – or perhaps some sort of maximum which could be allocated for that purpose.

You would be wrong.  Even if you disabled page files on each of your drives, you would still see two non-zero numbers there.  The latter of which would be the exact size of your installed physical RAM (minus any unavailable to the OS because of video cards, 32-bit limitations, etc).  Unfortunately, the label “page file” didn’t mean what people thought it meant.  To be honest, I’m not quite sure why that label was chosen.  I would have called it something else.

In Windows 7, that label changed to “Commit.”  This is a better name because it doesn’t lend itself as easily to misinterpretation.  However, it’s still not readily apparent to most people what “commit” actually means.  Essentially, it is this:

The total amount of virtual memory which Windows has promised could be backed by either physical memory or the page file.

An important word there is “could.” Windows establishes a “commit limit” based on your available physical memory and page file size(s).  When a section of virtual memory is marked as “commit” – Windows counts it against that commit limit regardless of whether it’s actually being used.  The idea is that Windows is promising, or “committing,” to providing a place to store data at these addresses.  For example, an application can call VirtualAlloc with MEM_COMMIT for 4MB but only actually write 2MB of data to it.  This will likely result in 2MB of physical memory being used.  The other 2MB will never use any physical memory unless the process reads from or writes to it. It is still charged against the commit limit, because Windows has made a guarantee that the application can write to that space if it wants.  Note that Windows has not promised 4MB of physical memory, however.  So when the process writes there, it may use physical memory or it may use the page file.

This is a great example of why disabling your page file is a bad idea. If you don’t have one, Windows will be forced to back all commits with physical memory, even committed pages which are never used!

Further, processes may be charged against the commit limit for other things.  For example, if you create a view of a file mapping with the FILE_MAP_COPY flag (indicating you want Copy-On-Write behavior for writes to the file view), the entire size of the mapped view will be charged as Commit… even though you haven’t used any physical memory or page file yet.  I wrote a simple scratch program which demonstrates this:

int wmain(int cArgs, PWSTR rgArgs[])
{ 
if (cArgs == 2)
     {      
         HANDLE hFile;
         hFile = CreateFile(rgArgs[1], GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, 0, nullptr, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, nullptr);
         if (hFile != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
         {
             HANDLE hMapping;
             hMapping = CreateFileMapping(hFile,
nullptr, PAGE_READWRITE, 0, 0, nullptr);
             if (hMapping != nullptr)
             {
                 void *pMapping = MapViewOfFile(hMapping, FILE_MAP_COPY, 0, 0, 0);
                if (pMapping != nullptr)
                 {
                     wprintf(L"File mapped successfully.  Press any key to exit and unmap.");
                     getwchar();
                     UnmapViewOfFile(pMapping);
                 }
                 CloseHandle(hMapping);
             }
             CloseHandle(hFile);
         }
     }
    return 0;
}

Before running this program, let’s take a look at Task Manager again.

Now, if I run this scratch program and pass it the path to my Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 ISO image (a 2.3GB file), the Task Manager readout changes to:

Notice how my physical memory usage is unchanged, despite the fact that Commit has now increased by the full 2.3GB of that file.

In fact, my commit value is now 6GB, even though I have only 4GB of physical memory and less than 3GB in use.

Note: It is not common for applications to commit enormous file mappings in this way.  This is merely a demonstration of Commit and Used Physical Memory being distinctly different values.

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard drive partition.

Apparently people decided to call this “God Mode” because to enable this “trick” you make a folder called GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and double-click on it.  Now you can see… the control panel.  With a slightly different view than you normally see it in.

So first off, why is this completely silly?  Well, the text ”GodMode” has nothing to do with making the trick work.  You can call the folder “ILikePuppies.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” and now you’ve discovered the magical “ILikePuppies” feature hidden in Windows.

Well, not really.  What you’ve actually discovered are two things:

First, you’ve discovered a documented feature of the shell whereby filesystem folders can be easily made into namespace junctions, as described here on MSDN.  Basically, any folder named <DisplayName>.<CLSID> will show up with just the <DisplayName> portion visible in Explorer, and navigating into the folder will take you to the namespace root defined by the <CLSID> portion of the name.  This isn’t a user feature, it’s a developer feature.

The second thing you’ve discovered is the “All Tasks” folder.  This is a special shell folder which is used as the source of the “Control Panel” search results seen in the Start menu.  This folder was not designed to be browsed to directly, as the normal Control Panel folder (accessible via Start -> Control Panel) contains all the same items but with a custom view designed to be easier to navigate.  The “All Tasks” folder has no custom view, so you just see the standard Explorer list view and little else.

The existence of this folder and its CLSID are implementation details and should not be relied upon by anybody for any purpose*.

God Mode?  Hardly.

Props to Ed Bott for his earlier post about this “trick.”

* = Update: The intended meaning of this statement was, “please don’t use this folder / CLSID in your app for anything, since it will probably break in the future.”  If you like using this view and are happy with an unsupported untested trick for your own personal use, then by all means, enjoy it.

In the responses to her post I saw a few comments along the lines of, “ageism happens, get over it.”  One commentor wrote:

“Truthfully, younger Folk will just not like you, simply because of your age, and in the workplace that has insidious ways of working against you no matter how good you are.”

This is completely counter to my experience.  If I ever had any preconceptions about how “with it” the older / more senior folks at Microsoft were, it didn’t take long for them to be washed away when I actually started working there.  In fact, one thing I love about my job is how closely I’m able to work with incredibly bright people who’ve learned so very much over their years in the industry or at the company.  I take every chance I get to learn from their experience. 

Yes I (and other younger folk) could shut them out and spend 20 years learning the same lessons the hard way, but that’s a terrible waste of the evolutionary gift that’s done the most to set our species apart from every other – our ability to pass on knowledge and experience from one generation to the next.

If you ask one of the people Mary Jo calls Millenials (which I read as ”you kids”), I’m sure most of us would be happy to extole the virtues of young engineers.  Today’s college grads know what it’s like to grow up with their own PC and cell phone.  They’ve probably gleaned a lot just from seeing their parents and teachers work with technology.  Their social paradigms have changed – many won’t know what it’s like to lose touch with friends from college or high school after they graduate and move away… they’ve got Facebook to automate the previously daunting task of keeping tabs on dozens or hundreds of people you’ve known.  Their world is smaller, their stages of life more connected with fewer seams. 

But the truth is you don’t have to be born in the 80s or 90s to understand these things.  I bet you Steve Jobs does, and he’s 54.  As much as the world has changed over the last couple decades, a heck of a lot has stayed the same.  Sure, maybe kids these days date differently, but I’m willing to bet that looking for ways to minimize your vulnerability and potential for embarassment is nothing new.  The medium is all that’s really changed.  You don’t have to be young to notice these trends or to empathize with young customers.  The best creative minds in any industry need to be able to put themselves in their customers shoes, whether you’re designing for someone 20 years your junior or 30 years your senior.

So I guess mine’s a two-part answer.  First, if you’ve got experience, it can be a tremendous benefit to you and to those with whom you share it.  Second, the ability to empathize with and understand others is an invaluable skill at any age.

As always, this is all just my personal non-corporate-approved perspective and may not reflect the experience of anybody anywhere (at Microsoft or otherwise).

I didn’t quit AT&T cold turkey, though.  In fact, I told myself this was an experiment to see how a different network and device might work for me – knowing that I could cancel within 30 days and return the phone itself for a refund.  Instead of porting my AT&T number, I left it active on the iPhone, and began directing friends and family to use my Google Voice number for calls and SMS, which I pointed at the new Verizon phone.  I also set my iPhone to forward calls to that number.

If you’re anxious to hear the result of this experiment, it’s this:  I am cancelling my AT&T account and going to try tomorrow to port my old number to the new Verizon account (something I hope is possible, but I’m okay if it isn’t).  For more details about this decision, read on as I dive into three topics: the phone, the network, and Google Voice.

1. The phone

First off, I must make it clear that the Droid doesn’t do everything as well as the iPhone.  The hardware isn’t as pretty.  The default software isn’t as nice.  Text selection isn’t as nice as iPhone or even WinMo.  Some apps I really liked on the iPhone are still missing (Kindle, Urbanspoon, OneBusAway).  Some apps like Facebook don’t compare.  Next to the iPhone, the built-in media experience is pretty awful. 

But there are a lot of things it does better.  It has a hardware keyboard which is a win for most people, though I find myself using the software keyboard out of habit which I actually like better than the iPhone’s.  It’s mostly the same but adds text prediction and is smarter about letting me fix its mis-corrections.

The screen is gorgeous.  The camera (with flash) is way better.  The software is highly customizable.  I can run apps in the background and the OS has central management of apps that sync (including the Facebook app, Twitter app, mail apps, etc).  Push Gmail is automatic. There are lots of great apps like Twitdroid and Google Sky Map, and many iPhone staples like Pandora, OpenTable, Flixster, Bump are around too.   Many of them, like Pandora and Qik, are far more functional. I can have Pandora playing in the background while I do other things.  I can stream video to Qik over the 3G connection.  There’s even an app in the Android Market for tethering over USB or Bluetooth (though I wonder if Verizon will have something to say about that soon).

The OS itself does a lot right too.  A common theme seems to be central management of app behaviors – like syncing, notifications, and even power usage.  The first time the Droid got to 15% power it offered to show me which apps and settings were draining my battery!  Who knows if it’s totally accurate, but man was this helpful.  At one point it helped me identify a widget I’d installed which apparently had a bad battery-draining bug.  Good stuff.

The built-in Maps and search features are awesome.  Google Latitude is pretty well integrated (much more useful than it was on the iPhone), as is a pretty effective voice search.  Finally, the Droid earns high marks from me for its Google Voice integration.  More on that below.

When I got the phone I was concerned about a few specific problems, including reports from people I talked to that they heard an echo during every conversation.  A quick look around the web revealed that this was a known issue (with a workaround which worked).  This problem was eliminated a few days ago when the OS 2.0.1 update was pushed to Droid users.  That update brought several other improvements, including an improved lock screen and some performance, battery, and reliability improvements.  Thus far my experience has been that this update is how the phone should have shipped originally.  But that’s not necessarily a knock against Google / Motorola / Verizon, since everybody seems to be shipping not-quite-finished software these days… In fact, the speed and ease with which they deployed a solid first “service pack” via an Over The Air update was impressive.

2. The Network

Verizon’s network, at this point, has proven vastly superior to AT&T’s.  While it feels like the number of “bars” I have is often lower, it doesn’t seem to matter.  The iPhone would say 5 bars but still fail to make calls, drop them half way through, or completely fail to establish a data connection.  When the data connection did work, it was very rarely as fast as it could / should be.  And latency always seemed to be a major problem.

On Verizon, I consistently get a responsive data connection.  I know that when I click my shortcut to the WS-DOT bridge traffic map that I’ll be seeing it in a few seconds.  On the iPhone 3G with AT&T, I’d often wait nearly a minute for it to begin loading, or have to try several times to get it to load at all.  Getting Twitter or Facebook updates on the iPhone was hit or miss.  Twitter apps would regularly return obscure connection errors, and the Facebook app would often require several attempts to upload a photo (trying to do this from a crowded place like a soccer game was basically impossible).

3. Google Voice

When Michael Arrington talked about the Droid with the Gilmor Gang, he raved about its integration with Google Voice.  I decided to give this a shot, and while I’m not sure its as big of a revolution as he suggested, I do see what he was on about.  The Droid + Google Voice together feel like a truly natural evolution of the mobile experience.

So what does it do?  Well, a Google Voice number is sort of like a domain name on the web.  You pick the area code and number (from the available ranges) that you want to use as your public alias, and then point it at a destination (via the device’s phone number, which is now more like its IP address).  You can choose multiple destinations (if you don’t answer one device, it can ring another), or you can change where it points on the fly.  SMS messages and voice mails arrive on the Google Voice web site at no cost, and can be accessed via a web browser or through a Google Voice application like the one for Android phones.  For “legacy” devices you can have it immediately forward messages via traditional SMS.  But with the Droid this isn’t necessary, you can just use the Google Voice app instead of the SMS app and not even know the difference (except that you don’t have to pay for SMS and can read or respond to them on the web).

In the end, it’s not a revolution as Arrington may make it sound, but it is an improvement.  With a phone like the iPhone it’s hard to imagine why Google Voice is useful.  It’s complicated to use it as your number because when you call people using the phone’s dialer, they see your device’s real number instead.  And Apple won’t even approve the Google Voice dialer app.  Same goes for text messages.

But on the Droid, there are no such restrictions from Apple / AT&T.  The Google Voice app takes over your dialer, so any calls you make come from that number.  It’s a largely seamless experience.  I say “largely” because the SMS experience could still be a little better integrated (perhaps by having GV push the messages into the phone’s native SMS app), and they don’t quite have the sync / push experience nailed down for them, but it’s nearly there and I’m confident it will be all the way there soon enough.

Overall verdict

As I mentioned before, I’m keeping the Droid and Verizon.  But there are a few caveats to be aware of.  I would NOT recommend one for non-techies like my girlfriend (who currently uses an iPhone 2G on T-Mobile) or my sister yet.  At least not to replace an iPhone.  Why?

Some of what the Droid does right it also does wrong.  The Droid (and more the Android platform as a whole) is built for a world that most people don’t quite live in yet.  That’s a world where you never need to connect your phone to your computer.  Don’t get me wrong, this is where things are going, I have no doubt about that.  But it’s not where things are, for most people.

Let’s look at one specific scenario: pictures.  First off, the phone has no concept of syncing pictures (or other media) to it.  In fact, if you plug the USB cable into your computer nothing happens.  As far as I can tell there’s no management software like iTunes for it.  It doesn’t even mount itself as a drive unless you push a button on the phone’s screen once it’s connected.  Because of this, there is no sync feature, so no process by which properly sized and thumbnailed images get copied to the device.  Instead you can mount the storage card and drag images to a folder on the device’s SD card, but the first time you go to view them they’ll take a while to load and have thumbnails generated.  Not a pleasant experience.

I doubt Google sees this as a flaw, though.  Copying or syncing media to your phone isn’t something you’re meant to do in the Google world.  Instead you’re meant to consume media “from the cloud” using the appropriate app or mobile web site.  For photos ,there are dozens of apps for interacting with Picasa, Flickr, Facebook.

For now, the iPhone has the advantage here.  It has a fantastic experience for locally synced media, while enabling lots of cloud-based scenarios like viewing and uploading Facebook photos.

The iPhone also has the advantage when it comes to a simple, intuitive user experience.  The Droid experience is good, but requires a lot more customization to really make it shine, in my opinion.  The iPhone just works.  If not for AT&T’s widely publicized failings, I would say that the iPhone is the best choice for a normal human.  But the reality is that AT&T’s network has been getting worse, not better.  That alone may be enough to justify a different choice, and the Droid is a perfectly sensible one.  Just make sure there’s a geek around to set it up for you.

- Is this a joke?
- This is terrible.
- If this is real, why is this Google person so excited about it?
- Marissa Mayer wrote the blog post?!?

What am I missing here?

Update: A Googler stopped by the comments section to point out that the post is actually credited to three people, not just Marissa.  I missed that on my first reading.  Thanks to Darren for bringing that to my attention.

Also, what do you think of the new “fade in on mouse movement” behavior?