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En route from my west side hotel to downtown LA in 2003 for the 2nd day of the PDC, I called a Windows architect friend on my cell to tell him how excited I was about WinFS and WPF and how useful this would be for Autodesk's customers. Imagine my disappointment when he told me that the PPTs I was reading and the keynotes I saw were fantasy. When I pointed out that they were being presented to thousands, many of us heads of product for key ISVs he said, "Gar, *no one* is working on these things. We're about to officially drop them".

At that day's keynote, watching Jim demo building an app using all this to the audience, I said to myself, "either my good friend of 10 years is uninformed or JimAl and these others are not telling the truth".

How awkward it must have been to be in the middle of that. But Jon describes the good downstream impact of this turmoil which is somewhat of a compensation. This failure sounds like a "look up" failure, that, looking up up the org chain rests on the CSA.

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Jun 30, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

"The main issue was that, beyond making PowerPoint slides, there wasn’t anyone working on it. "

Brutal.

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