Oh, now I get why Jeff Sandquist got his new Xbox and invited us over for pizza. He’s trying out a new team development methodology. See, along with me and my son he also invited Adam Kinney and Erik Porter over. They are two developers on the http://microsoftgadgets.com and Channel 9. I didn’t realize they were working tonight at first, but here’s how I caught on.

They would switch off playing games. Erik would jump on the Xbox, play a couple of games, then hand the controller to Adam, who would play a couple of more. I was distracted with my new phone, so didn’t see that while these two weren’t on the Xbox they were jumping on a laptop on Jeff’s kitchen table (here’s a picture of Erik coding away). Eventually I noticed this pattern and asked them what was up. Oh, and I noticed that Visual Studio was on the screen with source code.

Turns out they were fixing bugs in the site. The Xbox game was reward for knocking out a bug in the code.

Somewhere, someone should be studying whether the Xbox actually helps productivity of coders. Hey, it’s an interesting theory. Either way, the bugs got fixed and the development team seems happier than usual.

Jeff calls it the “frag-ile” development methodology. Heheh. I call it innovative program management.

Oh, and don’t miss the Gadgets site — there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening over there. The Microsoft Gadgets site is the first Microsoft site to feature user tagging. Also, the growth in that community is quite rapid. Lots of new gadgets have been added by non-Microsoft developers in the past couple of weeks.

Hey, I don’t have an Xbox 360, but that won’t stop me. I keep getting invited over to friend’s houses to play their systems. Which is funny cause I certainly won’t get them any new “achievements” (those are rewards for completing certain tasks).

That said, if you are one of the lucky Xbox 360 owners, you’re welcome to join us. I’ll be at Jeff Sandquist’s house tonight. I hear his daughter Josie has been practicing at Geometry Wars to beat me. Oh, Josie, beating me is no challenge at all! Can you beat Brandon, though? That’s the question!

His gamer tag is jeffsand. We’ll accept as many invites to play as we can tonight. I should be there by 7 p.m.

Doug Mahugh wrote up a report on his impressions of his first six weeks working at Microsoft. Says the coffee sucks. Oh, I agree! I’m drinking it right now. It’s drinkable, but that’s about the best you can say. Luckily there’s a Starbucks only a few yards from my office. But, like Doug says in his report, the other stuff makes up for the crappy coffee.

Oh, speaking of which, anyone notice that Microsoft is rarely called “the borg” anymore?

At dinner last night we were talking about just that. That Liz’s friends are telling her that Google is now scarier to them than Microsoft. She told us that AOL forced Google to start putting graphical ads on the search engine. I told her “oh, so they sold their philosophy down the river?”

Hey, Bill and Steve, now is the time to take the philosophy game over. I wrote a post in October of 2004 where I asked “what’s your product’s philosophy?”

Oh, just found this interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer over on Good Experience. She says: “We feel no pressure at all to switch to graphic ads, either internally or from advertisers.” Oh, really? Welcome to AOL!

Hmm, Preston Gralla over at CMP’s Networking Pipeline asks a more direct question: Has Google Become More “Evil” than Microsoft?

That’s not a question for a Microsoft employee to answer. But, if you find our evil, can you please send it back home where it belongs? Thanks! 😉

The philosophy question is the deeper and more important one, though, or maybe it’s the crappy coffee talking.