Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight

I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades.

It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

The Mandeville Canyon Fire in 1978, taken by my dad from our roof

We ended up living in the Palisades until I was 15, when we moved up to Seattle, but in that time, these sorts of fires happened almost every year to some degree. The 1978 one was a big one though, and my dad had a flight scheduled to New York the following morning. He woke up every hour during the night to check the wind readings, and loaded up our Impala wagon for a prompt evacuation. That is how precarious things were, even 47 years ago. By sheer luck that night, the winds subsided, and the Palisades were spared. A few more hours of wind and 1978 would have been 2025. Same damage. Completely flattened.

I guess Pacific Palisades has always been a wealthy area, but wealth back then seemed less of a step-function than it is now. The “alphabet streets” where we lived seemed like the most modest of the neighborhoods; the place where teachers, government workers, and clerks lived. My parents bought our 1200 square-foot rambler for $38,000, and pretty much no one in the neighborhood had views of anything. The neighborhood was so named because the streets went from Albright, to Bashford, to Carey, to Drummond, to Embury, to Fiske, to Galloway, to Hartzell, to Iliff, to Kagawa. Felt really great not having to even look that up just now, but I will admit that I was Today Years Old before realizing there is no J. I wonder why. Each street was basically the same, although I distinctly remember Galloway having more tree trunks pushing the sidewalks up, making it a better route for jumping your Mongoose bike or Powell-Peralta board.

Art Davidson: Meteorologist, and professional piggybacker

As a kid growing up in the ’80s, the Palisades had everything you could possibly want. It was a “free-range” neighborhood, where we could ride our bikes as far away as the Santa Monica pier without worry. Palisades Park was home to AYSO soccer, tennis, basketball, “Par Course” stations, and most importantly to me, little league baseball. I was part of the “orange” franchise which started you off as a Ranger, then a Twin, and finally an Oriole. Our patron saint was Mel Haggai, who up until now, I didn’t know had flown 30 missions over Germany as a gunner when he was growing up (!!!). Mel got me to switch from first base to catcher, where I could have more impact on games. We didn’t have a single left-handed catcher’s mitt in the entire league, so he bought me one with his own money. I also remember perennial umpire John Meyers, who took me, my friend Adam Segel, and a few others to Disneyland, only to have to deal with us getting thrown out of the park for jumping off of a few of the rides and causing havoc.

I remember several restaurants like Jacopos, Barerras, and Gladstones, but the center of the food universe in the Palisades from 1972 to 2007 was Mort’s Deli. I have never seen more of an institution in any town than Mort’s was to Pacific Palisades. What I wouldn’t give right now for a plate of latkes and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s.

Just a few more quick memories before moving back to the fires:

Our immediate neighbors on Iliff: Rick & Chickee Jensen, Sue & Gene Stratton, Norman & Mimi Rainwater, Cathy Crantz and her family, John & Robin Tripp and their family.
Classmates who would go on to become very well known: Leonardo DiCaprio, Oliver Hudson, Redfoo, Jason Segel, and Will.I.Am, amongst others.
The shocking murder of Teak Dyer.
My shortlist of favorite teachers: Mrs. Wong, Mrs. Petrick, Mr. Freedman from Pali Elementary and Mr. Baker from Paul Revere.
The Malibu Feed Bin, where a giant ostrich chased me when I was 4 years old and scared the living shit out of me.

I imagine there are people around the world picturing everyone caught up in this recent disaster as multi-millionaires with 5 homes who will Pay Any Amount to Not Pay Their Taxes. The Palisades, however, also contained everything from people who moved there when it was more modest, to food service workers in mobile homes, which have now also burned down.

The displaced residents of the Palisades (and other burning areas of LA like Altadena) perhaps don’t look like what you think of when you hear the term “climate refugee” but that is what they now are. That is also what many more of us are likely to become as weather events get more extreme. We can pat ourselves on the back for not living in a fire zone or in other precarious places like Florida, but quite literally at any moment, we could experience a 9.0 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone that will be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. If something like this hits Seattle in the next few decades, count me as completely unsurprised, and hopefully not dead. Some areas may be a bit safer than others, but we are all increasingly susceptible to something unexpected hitting. Even if you’ve convinced yourself the weather can’t hurt you, there are always meteors.

Predictably, thousands of people on social networks have suddenly become experts in large-scale fire prevention. Some people are convinced the Palisades was lost because of too little water pressure, too few firefighters, an offline reservoir, insufficient controlled burns, a mayor who happened to be on a trip, a losing mayoral candidate who allegedly would have prevented the whole thing, a firefighting budget that was supposedly cut but really was not, and yes, even DEI programs.

My meteorologist dad is now 90 years old, and still in perfect intellectual health. I went to visit him and my mom this weekend, and we talked a little bit about the fires and this formative piece of our lives that had been completely destroyed a few days earlier.

The thing I wanted to know most was the same thing everyone else probably does: could anything have prevented this, and if so, what? After all, we’ve known about this precise danger for at least 47 years and probably a lot longer. And when I say “precise danger”, I mean the entirety of Pacific Palisades getting burnt to the ground by a Santa Ana fueled fire.

I asked a lot of questions.

The first was whether that 1978 fire would have done essentially the same damage as this one if we didn’t get lucky with the winds dying down. He said it probably would have. This is important because it shows that no one thing that we did in the last 50 years caused this. Or more precisely, I should say “caused this possibility”. Perhaps it will come out later that a certain power line caused some sort of initial spark, but the important bit is that the likelihood of a catastrophic fire like this has been around for a very long time, and the possibility was only getting stronger. It was when, not if. Sparks happen.

The second thing I asked was about all of the ways fires like these can start. It turns out there are sources you probably already know about, like arson or lightning, but even a piece of glass lying in the dry brush can act as a catalyst. If you remember burning things with a magnifying glass and the power of the sun as a kid, you can picture what that might look like. Another potential source is sparks from power lines, and it’s particularly concerning to read that power lines near the flashpoints of the biggest fires don’t seem to have been de-energized during the peak winds. My dad explained that this is usually a last resort as people will not tolerate outages for days at a time for a risk they feel is so remote (more on this later), but certainly during the several hours when the winds were forecast to be hurricane strength, it seems plausible to have done something there. Like many aspects of this disaster though, it’s best we get the facts before passing final judgement. One thing my dad was particularly impressed by is that Ariel Cohen and the weather bureau got the prediction of wind conditions exactly right, to a level of accuracy you almost never see. We indeed knew everything was lining up for a catastrophically dangerous couple of days, and if you believe the governor of California (which I do in this case), we began a proactive response before the fires even started. Did energized power lines play a role, however? We’ll have to wait and see.

The next thing I asked is if he thought any of the things I mentioned above (i.e. controlled burns, more pressure in the hydrants) would have stopped this. He said probably not. We were not “50% more water or firefighters” away from preventing this. It was simply too big and spread too fast. This is the key bit: even though a lot of these fires start in the hills, far away from houses, the hurricane force winds carry the embers at hurricane speeds for miles. So even if the main fire is only advancing at a few miles per hour, the embers are spreading out like thousands of Molotov cocktails. This is why you can’t just do a controlled burn between the hills and the houses as a buffer. The Santa Anas launch the embers right across whatever your best laid plans might be.

So finally, we get to the most important part then. If we couldn’t have stopped the fire this week, was there anything we could have done to prevent this in the 47 years since the last time the Palisades almost burnt down?

The answer? Yes.

The first and most important thing that hasn’t happened in the decades since the last near-miss is establishing fire as an ever-present, existential threat in the community’s mind. You can tell this is the case by the sheer influx of money and people into the area lately. As a small example, I have some friends who moved there (on Iliff Street, in a rare twist of coincidence!) recently. If you told them there was a pretty good risk the entire town would burn down in their lifetime, they may have had second thoughts. Ditto for all of the real estate and business development that has transformed the formerly quaint village area over the last few years.

I am absolutely not implying that anyone already in the Palisades should have moved away. I don’t think I would have. You don’t just leave wonderful places you’ve put so much love into for a threat that may never affect you.

But the fact that this seemed like such a safe haven for newcomers shows the information gap that existed before last week. The insurance industry seemed to catch on recently, but to the average person in the Palisades, the risk of fire seemed more like perhaps an unlucky block getting destroyed, rather than the entire town.

To help explain the importance of threats remaining top-of-mind, my dad reminded me of his journey at the SCAQMD from the 1960s through the 1980s. He was part of a team in charge of improving the air quality of the South Coast Air Basin. This was mostly an exercise in reducing smog, and it was a long, successful journey that carries lessons for our emerging climate and fire crisis.

Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, I remember vividly the smog alerts every summer. One moment you are running around for hours, and then within a few minutes you can no longer inhale normally. You take quick baby breaths, walk inside, and cease physical exertion for the rest of the day. And when I say “can no longer inhale”, I don’t mean that it smells dirty. I mean your lungs reject the air coming in and seize up.

When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem. With the community behind it, the SCAQMD, California Air Resources Board, and the EPA introduced legislation that prohibited leaded gasoline, required catalytic converters, and moved forward with a variety of other actions that eventually reduced “very unhealthy” smog days from 160 (!!!) in 1981 to only 1 in 2021 and 2022 (!!!!!).

Think about that. If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, just being alive was hazardous to your health for half the year. Now, it’s a single day where you might want to stay inside.

This achievement was due to the work of Federal, State, and Regional air pollution control agencies, along with the combined research efforts carried out by scientists at Caltech, the University of California, and other academic institutions, but it would have never been possible if the community of Los Angeles didn’t lock arms with their government and perform the collective action necessary to solve the problem.

Getting people to take fire seriously would have clearly been more difficult than it was for smog, but it’s the only way to have created the collective action necessary to change the conditions of the Palisades over the last 47 years to prevent the extent of damage that occurred. What sorts of things would have reduced the damage? Something like the following:

The replacement of highly flammable large vegetation like eucalyptus trees with other alternatives.
The xeriscaping of yards with less flammable materials than grass.
The prohibition of wooden roofs, or at least a big insurance discount for replacing them.
Improved building materials and methods designed defensively against fire risk.

Although the Palisades is almost completely destroyed, there are some buildings that escaped damage, and to my eyes, they look like modern projects that used more stucco, steel, and concrete than wood. More expensive? Yes. But this is probably the way we need to think about building now, especially in areas even remotely at risk of this sort of thing. Pacific Palisades is one of the nicest locations on earth, and I’m sure plans are already being drawn to rebuild it, but there is no doubt in my mind that those plans will require these methods and safeguards. There is no longer a choice to do otherwise.

If you live anywhere near the reach of the Santa Anas, there may still be time to take action before this happens again. There is a 100% chance it will happen again at some point, perhaps even within the next few days or at this time next year. Los Angeles only has a couple more months to get any rainfall at all this season, and if the Santa Anas revisit in the autumn to an even drier backdrop, who knows what further catastrophes await.

I’m not going to say any more about these particular fires because after awhile, it’s just more speculation. Even my dad would tell you this is just his opinion, albeit one rooted in a long career of climate science in and around the Palisades. What I will say though is that if we want to avoid more catastrophes like this, collective action is the only solution.

I haven’t even mentioned the idea of human-induced climate change at all in this post, because it frankly doesn’t even matter at this point. Extreme weather is here, whether we caused it or not. Even if you believe, as some people do, that the earth just does this stuff on its own, it’s beginning to kill us at an accelerating clip, and that should be something we can all band together against. Right?

Often times, it is the artists in society who provide the parables to light the path forward.

If you’re familiar with the graphic novel and HBO Series “Watchmen“, you may remember that one of the plotlines revolves around an ex-superhero named Ozymandias conjuring up a plot to save billions of people from nuclear war by uniting the world’s superpowers against a common enemy. He engineers a giant squid and launches it from space into the center of Manhattan, where it explodes, killing many. The strategy works as intended, and the world bands together upon realizing the threat is ostensibly coming for everyone.

That is exactly where we are right now.

Earth is raining calamities down upon us that should unite us as a species. Will we do what we did during the pandemic and turn against each other again? Or can we use this even bigger, spiraling threat to put our disagreements aside and perform the collective action necessary to maintain human life on earth?

The planet will be just fine without us. It is we who are endangered.

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We are Hiring at Microsoft AI

Since reflecting on one year at Microsoft almost 12 months ago, a lot has changed. Most visibly to the outside world, we’ve completely re-designed and re-engineered our Copilot consumer app from the ground up with a a craft- and quality-first mentality.

Copilot Home — The New Copilot mobile app

Copilot Daily Briefing — Copilot Daily helps you catch up with world events

Image Generation — Generating images is easier than ever

Every element moves more gracefully, every response loads much faster, and every detail is more considered. Copilot may be the tip of the spear when it comes to how we are thinking about our products over the next decade, but we’ve also begun to modernize Edge, Bing, and our news offerings. We are just getting started.

Here is a preview of a feature we are working on for Edge that allows you to co-browse the internet with your AI companion. It’s the most powerful addition to the web browser since video:

Copilot Vision in Edge

We aren’t just adding to Edge, but we are also — just as importantly — subtracting from it. Although Edge has grown browser share consistently for several years now, we’ve also grown our feature set a little too aggressively. Every so often, you have to step back from the bonsai tree, look at it from all sides, and prune. The Edge of tomorrow will be both simpler and more powerful than it is today.

Same deal over on Bing. We are pruning away old growth to make room for better-looking, more powerful search results:

Cleaner search results — A world with cleaner search results

There is a lot more going on in Microsoft AI as well, including a bunch of new things we are cooking up for MSN:

A new butterfly for a new chapter of MSN

If you’re interested in joining the Microsoft AI team, we have a number of positions open right now that I’ve listed at the bottom of this post. If we already know each other, please reach out directly.

I mentioned in my last post a year ago how there were a lot of processes we needed to improve in the coming months. I detailed an unbroken chain of 8 steps for great products to emerge:

An idea that can improve lives if executed well.

Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.

Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.

Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.

Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.

Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.

Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.

… and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.

Although we are still in the first inning of this journey, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made across the board… in particular, steps 4 and 8. There is a different energy when everyone who is working on the product knows the standard is not “good”, not “better than our competitors”, but “the best version imaginable”. We are not there yet with any of our products, but there is no confusion where the bar is.

Reorienting our cross-functional teams to prioritize user experience has been a gratifying (and ongoing!) challenge. The vast majority of companies are not set up this way for a variety of reasons, some good, and some bad. In some industries, surviving might mostly about cost minimization, and not user experience. In other industries, “good enough” might be all people expect or need. But in just about all companies, there is some form of diminishing returns when it comes to how much time is spent getting every detail just right. The question is: where does a company draw the line?

One sign your company draws the line too low is if people insist that every detail, no matter how esthetic, be rigorously tested in order to prove it is instantly metrics-positive. This is a sign of a culture that rejects the value of taste and long-term vision.

Does that mean you should test nothing? Of course not. You should test everything, at the very least, to prevent accidentally messing something up. I still remember more than 20 years ago, during my first week at ESPN, causing our entire front page to disappear because I forgot a semicolon in a Javascript file. Testing for safety and information, though, is different than testing as religion. Furthermore, there are some things — particularly in the world of large language model training — that should absolutely follow a cycle of train/test/release/repeat.

Culturally speaking, this rebalancing of our values has created a spark for great work to emerge. Many of the same people who have been working on Bing, Edge, MSN, and Copilot for years simply have a new set of product-building principles now, in addition to some great new teammates and refreshingly smaller, evenly staffed cross-functional teams. It’s been wonderful seeing everyone exercise muscles that show up more often in startups and creative agencies than in 49-year old tech companies. The ingredients have been here all along, but the recipe is changing.

Speaking of ingredients, we are looking for more Designers and User Researchers to join the team at Microsoft AI.

These positions are United States only, Redmond-preferred, but we’ll also consider the Bay Area and other locations:

These positions are specifically in our lovely Mountain View office:

Note that we are looking mainly for experienced, hands-on individual contributors to join our team. If inventing the design patterns for the next phase of the consumer internet sounds right up your alley, we’d love to talk to you.

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We Live in the Golden Age of Ice Cream

I tried some absolutely outstanding ice cream yesterday that reminded me of yet another reason I feel lucky to be part of Generation X:

We are living in the golden age of ice cream.

In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and rocky road. There were a few shops like Baskin Robbins that marketed some scary stuff like Rum Raisin, but if you were just getting ice cream at the supermarket or some other ordinary location, those were your choices.

There also wasn’t as much science to ice cream back then. The term mouthfeel was still relatively obscure. It all seemed perfectly good back then because… ICE CREAM!!! … but compared to what we have today, it was, as the kids say, “supes basic”. In the 1980s, along came the frozen yogurt craze which pointed to how much untouched frontier was ahead of us. Shoutout to Humphrey Yogart, by the way — the world’s best named frozen dessert shop. Shoutout also to Aaron Cohen’s Gracie’s, which not only has excellent ice cream, but the world’s only bathroom dedicated to Dolly Parton.

Anyway, we’ve learned so much about fat content, texture, and flavor combinations since then that we have practically invented a new food group.

A few years ago, during a trip to the underrated gelato mecca that is Croatia, I had a variety which tasted different than anything I’d ever tried. It was a “fig yogurt gelato” from a little shop in Cavtat. I usually stay away from frozen yogurt because it’s generally not as good as ice cream, but this was intriguing. A great flavor (fig), combined with a beautiful tartness (yogurt), along with best texture for frozen desserts (gelato). It was outstanding, and I have not been able to find anything like it ever since…

Until yesterday!

Behold, Hellenika Cultured Gelato:

I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.

Hellenika is a small creamery run by three Greek/Australian siblings with a single location in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Until recently, it was not available in stores, but you can now pick up pints in Metropolitan Market.

If you live in Seattle, you need to try this immediately.

If you don’t, you should try to get someone to mule you some in dry ice. Hopefully one day it will ship on Goldbelly.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good low-grade Blue Bunny mini-cone as much as the next person, but I feel like we’ve passed through some sort of intergalactic hyperspace with this gelato. The future is now. Get this to your freezer any way you can. 🙌

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⇗ America’s Best Decade, According to Data

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine around 2016 about this, and he artfully explained this theory to me at the time. It was an aha moment for me, as I tend to view each new decade as "the best one" because of how the world has advanced over my lifetime. Your view on this appears to depend quite a bit on the degree to which the news you read enriches or poisons your psyche, but also the happiness and agency you feel over your own life as you've grown from a child into an adult. For some, this arrow points up, for others, it points down, but I bet the biggest increase in the last decade or so is those for whom the arrow points up but feels like it points down. Outrage and fear-fueled information platforms are partially to blame, but so is the very American culture of determining your own happiness by comparing yourself to your neighbors or peers.

I had the good fortune to attend the excellent Pearl Jam concert at Climate Pledge Arena last week, and it reminded me of something I already knew: I liked music in the 1990s more because I had the excitable mind of a teenager, and being 30 feet away from them brought me back to the very best of those times... but you couldn't pay me enough to go back in time to any decade.

There is no time like the present! 🙌

⇗ The Rise of Dopamine Culture

"Here’s where the science gets really ugly. The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure."

A spot-on analysis of where we are as a society with our addiction to short-form entertainment and distractions. I really only see one way out of this (for me, at least) that is simple and resolute: ditching the smartphone. I have tried this for periods of time and it's been perfectly fine in my personal life, but once you need to carry a smartphone for work, complete elimination becomes tricky. I've moved back to my iPhone Mini, which helps a bit, but the thing that would really do the trick would be a phone that only did messaging, phone calls, calendar, Teams/Slack, and maybe Maps. I honestly don't even need a camera, though I'd understand that addition.

One year at Microsoft

Last week marked one year at Microsoft for me, and what an unexpected adventure it’s been! I thought I was coming in to lead a a stable of popular, but well-trodden web properties, and I ended up getting to work on a whole lot more, including Windows, Bing Chat, and the company’s biggest bet in years: Copilot.

“The Handshake” — Designed with Love, in Puget Sound

I usually write a lot about the companies I work at but have held off until now because we haven’t been hiring. Well now we are! We’re specifically looking for Designers and UX Engineers to work on our design system for Copilot. Some of these positions are on my team and based where we have offices (Puget Sound, the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, Vancouver, Barcelona, Hyderabad, Beijing, and Suzhou) and some are on adjacent teams and can accommodate fully remote work. If you are a Designer or UX Engineer with a passion for design systems and AI, we’d love to chat.

Our deisgn team in Beijing — A recent visit to our team in Beijing… I had never been!

So what has year one been like? The good and the “needs improvement”. 🙂 👇

One of the reasons I decided to join Microsoft was I missed the joy of in-person product-making. I know not everyone feels the same way so I’m not trying to make any broad statements about local vs. remote work, but for me, it has been even more refreshing than I expected. I usually come in 3-4 days a week, while others on the team are anywhere from 0 to 5.

It’s funny, sometimes I will wake up on a Monday and think to myself “ahhhh, this is going to be a chill work-from-home day” and by the end of the day, I realize I’ve been staring into a screen on video calls for almost the entire day and how much that slowly saps my energy. Meanwhile, in-person days are filled with walks, whiteboarding, and energizing sessions with some of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had. I realize not everyone feels this way about being in the office from time-to-time, but I do. Even our fierce, interdepartmental karaoke battle helped bring a bunch of teams together who had never met before.

Mojin killin’ it at design karaoke

The other great thing about lucking out and joining when I did is that we are embarking on one of the rare paradigm shifts that occurs in technology maybe once a decade. The 1980s were about personal computers. The 1990s were about the internet. The 2000s were about smartphones. The 2010s were about the cloud. And the 2020s will be about AI. The really powerful thing about all of these developments is that they don’t replace each other, but rather they build on each other. AI is the result of everything that came before it. If you got into design to help shape the culture of the world around you, these are the moments you treasure.

These turning points are also wonderful because they give you a chance to reawaken to your Beginner’s Mind. I have learned more in my first year here than at almost any other time in my career. Not only does the pace of technological change in AI force you to build skills as you go, but there are so many amazing engineers, designers, researchers, writers, marketers and other creative people to learn from, that it happens almost automatically.

When I was interviewing here, not even my prospective new boss told me about any of what was behind the curtain. Only during my first week did I find out all we are working on to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That is Microsoft’s mission statement, if you hadn’t heard it before. It’s an uncommonly good filter with which we can all ask ourselves every day “does this project actually do that?” It’s quite freeing as it gives you license to question projects at every stage of development.

Ask questions as early as possible — Don’t sleep on these pillows

Another thing I’ve loved about my first year here is that I joined a group that has figured out how to ship very quickly. That also has its downsides, as we have plenty of craft problems to solve, but it’s great working for one of the largest and most established companies in tech and being able to ship within weeks of designing something.

One more thing that’s blown me away is the Inclusive Tech Lab, where we work on new technologies to make our products inclusive to people all of abilities and walks of life. No one experiences technology the same way, and teammates like Dave Dame and Bryce Johnson do a ton of great work to make sure that’s top of mind for everyone.

Finally, one of the unsung benefits of working for a native Seattle company again is that Seahawks stuff is all over the place. Presentations, charity auctions, everyday office attire… you name it. It’s nice to not be the only one with good taste in football teams.

Seahawks art on campus — There are actual seahawks on campus

I am no corporate shill, however, so I must also be honest about some of the things that need improvement over here.

At the top of my list is that Microsoft has not yet fully embraced the role design plays at most other tech companies. We were engineering-driven in 1975 and we are squarely engineering-driven in 2023. The world, meanwhile, has changed in that time. It is no longer sufficient for complex things to work. They must also shed their complexity. People expect the products and services they spend their time and money on to delight. To overdeliver. To give them superpowers. Those sorts of qualities only materialize when you have supergroups building products.

In music, a supergroup is when a singer, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a keyboardist (and so on) who are all at the top of their game come together to create an album. In tech, a supergroup is a researcher, a couple of designers, a product manager, and a Volkswagen Bus or two full of engineers. Up until a decade or so ago, a lot of tech companies followed the model of packing projects with as many smart engineers as they could find and only sprinkled in things like design and research as necessary. I still see some of this thinking in pockets over here. I’m trying to influence things, but it’s a delicate dance, especially when the company has had such enormous success by doing so many other things very well.

I think there are plenty of people here who still feel like being engineering-led is unequivocally good, but to those people I would say that in a modern tech company, design is engineering. It’s no better or worse, but it does have very different leverage in the building of a product.

A diagram of a cross-functional team — Mess up the green or the yellow, and all the blue work can be wasted

On the plus side, Microsoft has never had as much design and research talent as it has right now, and we are increasingly looked to by the executive leadership team as lighters of the path. When we go into high-stakes meetings, we always go in with pixels and prototypes, which are uniquely good at cutting through bullshit and ambiguity. As a wise person once said, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

There are a ton of amazing designers and researchers who have been here for 10 and even 20+ years whose hard work has led to this moment of evolution for the company, and every day I am in awe of their perseverance.

Temple of the Dog concert photo — Temple of the Dog: Seattle’s greatest supergroup

Next on my list is how often we get in our own way with “procedural goo”. I’ve worked in plenty of large companies including Twitter, Disney, and MSNBC, and have never seen the level of approvals, paperwork, and rules that get in the way of speed and autonomy here. Just transferring someone from within my own org to a slightly different role within my own org took a dizzying amount of effort. At most companies, this would have been about 10 minutes of work: one minute from me and nine from someone in HR trying to navigate to the right screen in Workday.

Then we have acronyms. My GOD do we have acronyms. I actually liked acronyms before I got here! I usually think they are cute. After seeing a new one almost every single day since getting here, I have resolved to never use them either inside or outside of work. I even say “Cyan Magenta Yellow Black” out loud if I have to!

When I think of bad acronyms, I always remember cf2gs: an excellent, but unfortunately named ad agency from Seattle’s past

Finally, the last thing on my list — and this is where you come in — is dedication to craft. It is so tempting to try and “science” your way into viable products these days. Build the beginnings of a customer base through rudimentary product-market fit, and then fastidiously optimize your funnel, your game mechanics, your viral loops, your push notifications, and so on and so forth. These gains are not always easy to come by, but they are rooted in ruthless experimentation and allegiance to short-term data. Our north star is at least pretty pure — Daily Active Users — and that metric is usually a good indicator that you’ve made something people like, but doctrinaire allegiance to almost any singular metric can quickly make people forget why we are in this profession to begin with: to improve lives. Or to put it squarely in Microsoft parlance again: to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.

If you ever find yourself asking the question “how can we increase Daily Active Users?” instead of “how can we make our product better for people?”, you’ve already lost. Metrics are trailing indicators of qualitative improvements or degradations you’ve made for your customers… they are not the point of the work.

Recently, we’ve made some excellent strides in prioritizing qualitative product improvements even when they fly in the face of metrics we care about, and it’s really gratifying to see. It reminds everyone that a product is the collision of thousands of details, and the crafting of these details requires taste.

Edwin Land and his magic Polaroid camera — The Polaroid SX-70 camera: a triumph of design, engineering, and dedication to craft.

Designers are often looked to as “owners of craft and taste”, but craft is very much a team sport. It’s not just how things look and feel but also how they work. I very much like how Nick Jones (channeling Patrick Collison) at Stripe put it in this video:

“What we put out there should quite plausibly be the best version of that thing on the internet“.

To do this takes an unbroken chain of excellence:

An idea that can improve lives if executed well.
Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
… and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.

Some people would look at this list and think “yep, makes sense”. Others would look at it and think “sounds slow and not very agile”. The trick to balancing this level of quality with speed of development is realizing that it’s often more efficient to experiment in step 3 than it is in step 6. This is why so many modern tech companies realize that hiring more designers and researchers doesn’t waste time and money… it saves time and money. With less than a week of one designer’s time, we can produce a wide variety of prototypes to test with real people. Just recently, we created an entire GPT-powered research application without even bothering a single engineer.

Design is engineering.

Finally, a brief note about prototyping. I would argue that the most impactful innovation in the craft of product development over the last 20 years has been the rise of rapid design prototyping. Prototypes that demonstrate an experience are useful not just in usability testing, but also in selling ideas up and across the organization. Engineers hate working on things that haven’t been thought through or “appropriately politicked” yet, and if you can bring them a working prototype that has already been vetted with users and various stakeholders across the company, they will love you for it and work hand-in-hand with you to get every detail right.

Design prototypes are the currency of a high-craft, high-speed product development organization, and they are increasingly the currency of our team.

Alright, back to the hiring. I plan to hire against the entire growing list of products our team is responsible for: Copilot, Windows, Edge, Bing, Start, Skype, SwiftKey, and so much more… but for now, this is a concerted hiring effort centered around Designers and UX Engineers to help build out the emerging design system for Copilot and our suite of AI-powered products.

If this is you, please have a look at the following roles we’ve just posted:

We’d love to work with you on the future of design systems at Microsoft!

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Yes, Rubbing Snail Slime on your Face Actually Works

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post on Mike Industries, so I thought I would resume programming with an unorthodox product suggestion that I am pretty sure you will love: snail mucin.

I recently got back from a trip to Korea where this stuff was all over the place. I had heard about people rubbing snail slime on their faces before but never really gave it much thought since I have quite literally never found any sort of face cream/lotion/serum that seemed any better than anything else. They are usually either too greasy or they evaporate too quickly. I’ve had pretty splotchy, combination skin my whole life, and oddly the only thing that has ever helped me is the sun. Come fall and winter, when sun is harder to come by in Seattle, things usually deteriorate pretty rapidly.

On a whim, I decided to buy three snail-based products: this cleanser, this serum, and this cream. Total cost: $45. (These are not affiliate links.)

It’s been almost two months now, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven’t had a single dry patch, blemish, or even a hint of redness since the very first application. Just a dollop of serum in the morning, a regular face wash with the cleanser at night, and a spot of cream right after. Whole thing takes a only a minute.

Other than the results, the best thing about this stuff is the way it feels. It’s just a super thin layer that stays on all day and you don’t even notice it.

Anyway, skin care is way off of my normal beat, but I figure if you’re looking for something new yourself or want to give an amazing gift this holiday season, you owe it to yourself to try this stuff! It really does work.

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I’m Joining Microsoft!

Despite living in Seattle for almost all of my adult life, I haven’t actually worked for a local company in almost ten years. Remote work is great in so many ways, but in-person collaboration is what gives me life.

In confident pursuit of that feeling, I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft to run Design & Research for their Web Experiences organization.

I was Microsoft-adjacent 10 years ago at MSNBC.com in Building 25, but this will be my first time as a blue badge, so to speak. I’m also thrilled to be joining Liz Danzico and John Maeda, who have also started at Microsoft in the last several months. I’ve known them both for a long time and have wanted to work with them forever.

There are several things which drew me to this opportunity, but at the top of the list is the people. Not just Liz and John, but the thousands of teammates in Seattle, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Barcelona, Beijing, and many other cities. There are certainly some great solo efforts in tech, but almost all of the best work I’ve been around has been the result of getting the right people jammin’ with each other. In my first several days here, I’ve already met so many of those people, and I can’t wait to continue the momentum Albert Shum created by carrying the torch for one of the best Design & Research teams in the Pacific Northwest.

The second thing I’m super excited about is the scale of the work. I’ve worked on the largest sports site in the world and one of the largest social networks in the world, but the properties in this group reach well over a billion people. Between the (refreshingly fast!) Edge browser, MSN, Bing, and several other products, Microsoft has quietly built up one of the top five properties in the world in terms of traffic and reach. They’ve also done it with humility, knowing how far they are from being perfect. I also love that so many of these products can and will be so much more as we begin to use some of the technology that’s emerging within Microsoft. In my first two weeks, I’m already overflowing with ideas.

Finally, the other thing I’m most excited about is getting back into the office in a flexible hybrid environment. I’ve worked in-person for most of my career and remotely for the last four years, and where I’ve landed is that everyone’s preferences are different, and it’s just tradeoffs all the way down. Where you land depends on a mix of your personality, your life outside of work, and what type of job you have. For me personally, I very much like being around people and feel like I do better work when I am… but I also like getting back my commute time a couple of days a week and making daily jogging more convenient. Also, Henry (pictured above) enjoys the extra lap time. Microsoft’s hybrid policy is a nice balance, and it sounds like exactly the right setup for someone like me.

Speaking of the exactly right, this also feels — for me at least — like exactly the right time to join Microsoft. The company has been through several distinct eras over the decades, but this feels like the era of re-commitment to the planet. To customers delightful experiences, to employees a great environment, and to the natural world, a smaller and eventually negative carbon footprint.

It’s a new year, and I couldn’t be any more here for it!

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How to Automatically Post your Tweets to Mastodon

Over the last several weeks, I’ve gotten in the habit of trying to move all of my Twitter activity over to Mastodon instead. I signed up for Mastodon several years ago, but only now are there enough people using it for it to replace a lot of what you might use Twitter for. Some of your friends are there, some of your favorite bots are there, and some news sources are there. What more do you need in life, really?

I’ve been using Pinafore (along with a user stylesheet I created… feel free to grab it for yourself) to use Mastodon on the web, and a combination of Ivory and Metatext on my iPhone. Ivory looks a bit nicer but Metatext has a Notifications tab that acts more you’re used to it working on Twitter.

If you want to move all of your activity over wholesale, go to town. If, however, you want to keep publishing Tweets on Twitter and have them automatically publish to your Mastodon account as well, this short guide is for you. The entire process should take around five minutes. It’s mostly just clicking around on a couple of websites.

Important: If you do this, the goal should not be just replicate your Tweets and never visit or engage on Mastodon. The goal should be to help you build your Mastodon presence and save you from having to manually double-post. Ideally you quickly get to the point where Mastodon becomes your primary crib.

Step 1: Open a Mastodon account

If you’ve already done this, great. If you haven’t, head to any server you want — like mastodon.social, for instance — and set up your account. You can always switch your server (along with any followers you accrue) later, so don’t stress about the server you choose.

⇗ Jony Ive on Life After Apple

One of our generation's greatest and most influential designers hasn't slowed down as much as he has simply shifted focus. A great example of splitting your life into chapters and knowing when it's time to explore the next one.

Step 1: Open a Mastodon account

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