Most valuable

I hope everyone in the US and Canada enjoyed their respective national holidays. We had a wonderful 4th of July. My 14-year-old son's all-star baseball team played in a tournament this weekend, continuing into this week. So far they've won one game and lost another. It's double-elimination, so with the next loss they're out. Hopefully they can keep playing for awhile. My 12-year-old daughter played in the annual 4th of July parade in Everett, WA, today. (I live about 25 miles north of Microsoft's main campus, in the city of Everett.) After that, my five-year-old daughter got to be part of a nice little street fair, with rides and food and face painting. We finished the evening off with fireworks in our cul-de-sac. One of our neighbors bought a ton of fireworks and put on a nice little neighborhood fireworks show. It was a fun, family-style fourth for my family.

It's always weird getting back to work after a long holiday weekend. Work was far from my mind all three days, but now I really need to get back into the swing of things. One of the things that's top of my agenda is to start getting to know the MVPs around my team's technology. MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, are people who work outside our company to provide quality customer support to Microsoft customers around the globe. There are MVPs around almost every type of Microsoft product, from Word and Excel to XBox and Windows SDKs. Dedicated, professional and passionate about helping others, these are the people who are experts on Microsoft technologies and who care deeply about helping Microsoft to do our best to produce great quality products that our users will love and find useful for their needs.

We very much value the skills, experience and interests of our MVPs, and we like to leverage their passions by asking them what they think of our latest ideas. Is our new thinking genius or harebrained? It's part of my 2005-6 goals to get to know these people better, so that's top of my list for this week. And maybe attending a few more games played by the South Mukilteo Juniors Little League All-Star team.