1. What was technology like when you were a child, and what got you interested in technology?
I was born in 1972, and was a young child when the explosion happened for stand-up arcade games. I used to ride my bicycle down to our local arcade (“The Electric Horseman”) and play all of the classic stand-up arcade games: Pac-man, Centipede, Asteroids, Galaga, Battlezone, Tron, Moon Lander, etc. etc. Like most kids, I loved games and I was way more drawn to video games than anything else. One of my good friends got an Atari 2600 as the home-console generation just started (and eventually killed the stand-up arcade) and I played all of those classic games as well: Space Invaders, QBert, Track and Field, etc. etc. But I was very much just a kid using these new technologies, I never really spent much time thinking about how they were made, nor thinking that I could make one myself. The 6th grade was the huge year for me. 3 things happened. First, I stumbled upon a magazine called Byte which was a popular computer magazine, with an issue about digital art. I have always been hugely interested in art and drew and painted constantly, so the idea that I could use a computer to make the art I saw in video games really intrigued me. Secondly, my school got a few Apple II GS computers and offered a programming class. As luck would have it, the class was about how to create 3D objects using a program – connecting back my interest in digital art. Finally, for my birthday my parents bought me a Commodore 64 computer. At first I was disappointed (I wanted a game console, but I cannot remember now if it was an Activision or Colecovision…) but then I realized I could play games on it and try out some programming at home. I used to check out Byte magazines from my school library, because each issue came with a set of small cheesy programs that you could do yourself in Basic. I have been hooked since then.
2. What compelled you to get really serious about I.T., and how did you wind up at Microsoft?
The answer to both of those questions is connected. As a teenager, I built (and constantly upgraded) my home PC with whatever money I made from my job (washing dishes at first, then working at a hobby shop for most of high school.) I was mostly just an interested tinkerer, and most of the upgrades were about gaming. As I sadly learned, most digital art programs were way way outside of my reach financially. I wasn’t doing much serious programming, just dabbling and making small games in QBasic. When I graduated high school, I intended to go to art school to do transportation design (I’m a huge car enthusiast) but I had one big problem: No money. My parents were very poor, and although I could qualify for aid for school, living expenses just made it impossible. So I decided I needed to quit the hobby shop to get a higher paying job, go to night school, and save money so I could go to art school in 2-3yrs. I wound up working at a store called Egghead Software, and it was heaven. I liked talking to (most) people, I knew a lot about computers and learned a TON more on the job, but the really great thing was that Egghead allowed employees to “check out” programs and take them home to learn them (they wanted sales people to be experts.) Of course I checked out a new game every day, but after I burned through the game section I started checking out more serious programs. Word and Excel (before they were sold together as Office), Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw, and then the programming languages (Borland C++ was the big dog of the day, Microsoft C++ was a distant second.) I taught myself to program (Borland C++ was a 25lb box, with 18 floppy disks and 24lbs of books) while working there. After I’d been there 2 years I hadn’t managed to save much money, and was starting to feel like my dream of art school was dead. I was talking with a regular customer of mine in the store one day and he said “Gabe, you should apply for a job at Microsoft, you’d love it.” I was 19 at the time J I interviewed (it was terrifying) and was offered the job on the day of my 20th birthday. Best present ever!
3. What are some of the best highlights from your career; things that you reflect on that were really awesome?
I’ve been amazingly fortunate and have been able to work on tons of great projects here. One of the great things about Microsoft is that we are involved in so many things, that we have opportunities as employees to get a lot of exposure. Some of the big highlights for me are:
- · I started our Security Response team for Internet Explorer in 1996, right when the world began to be aware of the risks of viruses and malware. I learned a lot about security as well as how to build a team which was focused on rapid response and management of issues.
· I was part of the team that started our Sustained Engineering group in Windows, responsible for delivering hotfixes and service packs to customers.
· I led the effort to build our first product telemetry systems at Microsoft. Before then we had no idea about how many problems were occurring on customer systems, nor were we able to debug them. I built the technologies to allow us to upload crash, hang, and other failure data (Windows Error Reporting) as well as our anonymous data collection system for usage data (Customer Experience Improvement Program.) I won several engineering awards, got a few patents, and published a paper based on this work.
· After Vista, I started a Performance team for Windows. We spent 3 years turning the biggest, slowest version of Windows ever into the lean mean Windows 7 release – the first edition of Windows ever that used less resources (memory, CPU, disk) than its predecessor. I was promoted to Director and expanded my team to include reliability and security, and for Windows 8 we bested Windows 7 on those dimensions. Making it the most efficient, most reliable, most secure version of Windows ever.
· For Windows 10 I was running an even further expanded team (adding Data Science to my other “Fundamentals” role) and was able to lead the effort to enable Flighting and Feedback for our Windows as a Service strategy. As part of that I started the Windows Insider Program and got to be the face of the effort for a while, one of the most satisfying and fun things I’ve ever done at work.
4. Where do you see the industry going, what will change, and what do you hope will change?
That is a huge question. Everything will change. Our whole industry is about change. If I were to sum it up it would probably be a statement about the joining of the digital and physical worlds. The digital world is going to overlay the physical. Augmented reality will allow us to see digital projections into the real world as if they were physical things. Your “computer” will be all around you, every wall can be a screen, every surface can be augmented digitally. It will change everything about how people work, play, interact, and learn. At the same time, the physical world will be becoming digital. 3D printers will be commonplace. Products will be “micromanufactured” locally so you can walk to a corner store and have them print you a new phone, or new shoes, or clothes that fit you perfectly. They won’t be made half a world away, they’ll be made on the spot. You’ll be able to scan any physical object and manipulate it digitally, then print out the version that you made. The other big change is that the devices you carry or wear, or that are in your home will be dumb. They compute power will be distributed and in the cloud. Your phone, your PC, and other devices will just be sensors and input/output mechanisms. Sending data to the cloud where it’s computed then sent back to your device to show you the output. Machine learning, AI, and big data analytics will make the cloud smarter and advances in quantum computing and cryogenics will make the cloud compute capabilities vastly more powerful. As far as what I WANT to see change, I think it is about changing the face of technology development. I want to see more women and people of different races and cultures involved. I want to see the industry welcome, encourage, empower, and embrace them vs. resisting that change. Technology to me is about democratization – it’s something that is for everyone and therefore should be made by everyone so that it encompasses the needs of the whole human race.
