I know about some o' dem *bilities!

When I read Larry Osterman's blog post *bilities from Friday, I could not help but be reminded of two other posts from people.

One was from Eric Lippert, entitled How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?, which I remembered from way back when it was just an email response to someone who wanted their feature added to the scripting engines.

The other was that post from minimsft I talked about in Not so small as to be internationally stupid, which was a great example of mini deciding that having all of the "overhead" of these extra kinds of checks somehow made Microsoft worse. Hmmmm... that whole idea of fewer markets, less money, less satisfaction internationally -- it really seems unappealing to me, just as it did back then.

It seems like the model that Jim Fawcette was pushing years ago when he was doubtful about my attempts to make him think of international markets as a bit more core than he did.

But when I think about the *bilities post that Larry did, I feel a lot more connected to it than the others; it is hard for me not to feel pretty personally tied up with the *bilities.

You see, I end up on a lot of emails where people are doing their due diligence in investigating several of the more internationally focused *bilities and asking what I think, under the theory that I'll know the answer if it has anything to do with international stuff.

Maybe they knew of me, more likely they did a GoogleLive search and hit a page of the blog. Whatever. :-)

When its something I don't know myself, I usually know who to ask, so it all works out okay....

It's funny to think that internal people at MS will so often make the same assumptions that external people sometimes do about my role, but neither greater visibility nor widened scope of influence can really hurt a career, right? :-)

So let's keep up with dem *bilities!

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