My excuses for not blogging about the Microsoft/Teamprise deal

2009-11-13 18:51:17

People keep asking me why I haven't blogged about the Microsoft acquisition of our Teamprise division.

Well, it's kind of complicated.

It all started three days before the signing of the deal when my laptop died. And I mean it's really dead. It won't boot, from any device.

Great timing, eh?

Fortunately, all I really needed for working on the deal was email and Microsoft Word, so I just switched over to my netbook.

I completely forgot about the MacBrick Pro until this weekend when I realized that the press coverage was going to hit Monday morning and the only installation of my blogging software was trapped in a lifeless piece of aluminum on my office floor.

So I ran out and bought a new Mac laptop, hoping to get everything going in time to write my blog entry for Monday.

And then I figured, heck, as long as I was doing a completely new setup, why not start off right with an Intel X-25M instead of the stock hard disk?

Getting everything configured wasn't too difficult, but the SSD ended up costing me a lot of time because Monday morning I had to tell the other coders on my project team that I can do a full build in 24 seconds. All that gloating killed a couple of hours, and by the time I got back to my desk I figured I should check and see how the press coverage was going.

Whoa. The Microsoft PR machine is amazing! They got over 230 articles published about the acquisition. I couldn't get that kind of press coverage without committing a felony.

Right about then I got into an argument with my daughter because I wanted her to walk four blocks from her school over to my office and she said it was too far. I wish my Mom would call me more often to tell me how much she appreciates the fact that I was a model teenager who never caused my parents any trouble.

So anyway, with hundreds of people already writing about the deal, I needed a new angle. I figured I had to come up with something cool or not post anything at all. So I started drafting something, but I got stuck when I couldn't find anybody to confirm whether Kanye West jokes are still funny or not. (Yo Eric! I'm really happy for you and I'mma let you finish, but Groove was the greatest Microsoft acquisition of all time!)

A short time later our sales VP walked in to let me know that SourceGear's name was mentioned in the "New York Freaking Times". Cool.

The next morning I resumed working on this blog entry, or rather, on the infrastructure to support same. I restored the VMware image from my Time Machine disk, but I couldn't get the product serial number to work. So I figured maybe it was one of those stupid Snow Leopard bugs that everybody is complaining about, and decided to upgrade to 10.6.2. But that took hours, because apparently every Steve Jobs disciple on the planet was upgrading their Mac on the same day, so Apple's download servers were really slow.

While I was doing that, the aforementioned daughter asked me to drive her to the mall and I refused. So she walked FIVE MILES to get there by herself.

Keep that in mind next time you're having trouble understanding the mind of a teenager: FIVE MILES to the mall is a shorter walk than FOUR BLOCKS to your Dad's office.

Suddenly I realized it had been a whole day since I told any of my coworkers that I can build the whole tree in 24 SECONDS, and well, you know what happened to the rest of my morning.

So then I walked across the street to the coffee shop to pick up a copy of the local newspaper. As usual, they did a very nice job on the press coverage for us. And, as usual, our story was below the fold because the main story of the day was about farming.

Keep that in mind next time you're having trouble understanding the mind of Champaign: If you want your big-time corporate acquisition to be the top story, make sure you work something about corn yields into the deal.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's 232 points for the Microsoft PR team and one point for me. I'm sure there's some PR guy at Microsoft trying to take credit for Don Dodson's piece in the Tuesday morning edition of the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, but that one was MINE. They may be able to place stories in the New York Freaking Times, but I've got connections too.

I'm not kidding -- building this project's code on some machines can take several minutes, but my new Mac can do a whole build in 24 seconds. The X-25M is way cool. I am now seriously considering putting a $700 SSD into my $300 netbook.

This morning I gave up and paid VMware for a new serial number, and here I am writing in my blog once again.

As I write this, the realization hits me. I got frustrated because I couldn't move my VMware installation to my new machine. My company just had a liquidity event. I could have paid VMware $79 to solve the problem, but instead, I decided it would be better to thrash on that problem for three days and THEN pay the $79. Yep, I'm in the big leagues now.

So anyway, if you haven't heard, Microsoft announced Monday morning that it has acquired our Teamprise division. I think the deal ended up being a nice win for both Microsoft and SourceGear.

I'll be at PDC next week. Stop by the SourceGear booth and say hi.