Trevin Chow

Starting Friday, June 26, 2009 you will be able to pre-order Windows 7 on

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Today, we announced the Windows 7 Upgrade Option and Windows 7 pricing.SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "", url: "" });

Microsoft Bing launched today publicly, and color me impressed.   I was always a fan of portions of Live Search, but the improvement they’ve made across the board with Bing is impressive. It’s nowhere

Here is a list of 5 Greasemonkey scripts that drastically improves my experience on the web almost every day:

Since launching Microsoft Store US last November, our team has been hard at work bringing new products to the site, updating the content and planning what our next release would cover.  After a mere 7 weeks of development, the team has done an incredible job at updating some fundamental parts of the site, both customer facing as well as on our back-end for tools and optimizations.

In terms of customer facing features, we’ve done a considerable amount of work to re-design our checkout flow based on usability studies, customer feedback and instrumentation data.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share 3 of the many changes we’ve made in this release, which helps make the shopping experience easier for our customers.

Our first change was enabling customers to calculate shipping costs and tax from the summary page, after a customer added a product to the shopping cart.  Previously, customers only saw tax and shipping costs on our “confirmation” page, right before they agreed to commit the purchase. 

Customers now have the option of calculating shipping costs and tax without leaving the page, and before continuing down the checkout path.  If a customer is buying an ESD product, they will only have the option to calculate tax since shipping charges don’t apply.

This one has been floating around for a little while, but it’s so good, it’s worth sharing:

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If you spend any amount of time in Outlook and manage meetings, you’ll quickly find almost overwhelmed by responses to meeting requests you setup with other people. 

As soon as they hit Accept, Tentative or Decline, it will fire off an email to the meeting organizer (you).  At Microsoft, this typically means that for every meeting request I send out, I get at least 6 responses back due to the average size of meetings I run on my team.  Before I hit <delete> on the responses, I always scan them in case the sender included a comment in their reply.  For instance

For Microsoft Store, we have quite a few different email templates that we used to send customers emails for things like order receipts and shipping confirmations.  When we were creating these HTML email templates, it was eye opening (read: shocking) to learn how support for HTML & CSS element varied great among different webmail and email clients.  One tag that worked in Hotmail wouldn’t work in Gmail, then when we found one that worked in both, it wouldn’t be compatible with Outlook or Yahoo webmail.  It was frustratingly to say the least, and underscored why projects like the Email Standards are so important.

Some examples of differences:

I’m now using the MyBrand featu

I’ve wanted to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) process, especially since I deal with so much email on a daily basis.  After years of haphazardly adopting a subset of the GTD practices, I finally decided that 2009 was going to be the year that I got my inbox, and productivity, under control.

Being a “knowledge worker”, the work I do on a daily basis depends on so many other people both inside my team and outside my team, so a lot of work is done in email and in meetings.  Because of this, the volume of email that I get can be absolutely crazy at times, as everyone else at Microsoft (and other large tech companies) can attest to.

After about a week of re-reading David Allen’s awesome book and listening to Merlin’s Man’sSHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "", url: "" });