A Function That Forces

At Microsoft, there’s this passive-aggressive cultural thing called a “forcing function,” which, to put it crudely, is an engineering way for us to control the behavior of others. The idea is that you set up something to happen, like a meeting or an event, that will “force” a person or group to do something that you want them to do.

For example, if someone won’t answer your email, you can set up a meeting on their calendar. Since Microsoft is a meeting-oriented culture (even though we all hate them), a ’softie will be very reticent to decline your meeting request. So, they have a choice — they can attend your meeting so that they can answer your question in person or they can answer your email and get that time back in their lives. This kind of forcing function can take larger forms as well. I can’t say that our execs make the decision like this (since they don’t talk to me : ), but it is the case that signing up a large number of Microsoft employees to host and speak at important industry events does have the effect of making us get together to ensure that our technologies and our descriptions of those technologies holds together (well, holds together better than they would otherwise : ).

Unfortunately, this way of thinking has become so much a part of me that I’ve started to use it on my family (which they very much do not like). Worse, I use it on myself.

For example, I have been holding back on half a dozen or more blog posts until I have the software set up on my newly minted web site to handle blog posts in a modern way, namely via Windows Live Writer. In other words, I was using the pressure inherent in the build up of blogging topics to motivate me to build the support I wanted into sellsbrothers.com to have a secure blogging endpoint for WLW. Before I moved all my content into a database, I could just pull up FrontPage/Expression Web and type into static HTML. Now that everything is data-driven, however, the content for my posts are just rows in a database. As much as I love SQL Server Management Studio, it doesn’t yet have HTML editing support that I consider adequate. Further, getting images into my database was very definitely a programming task not handled by existing tools that I was familiar with.

So, this is the first post using my new WLW support and I’m damn proud of it. It was work that I did with Kent Sharkey, a close friend of mine that most resembles Eeyore in temperament and facial expressions, and that just made it all the more fun!

Anyway, I’m happy with the results of my forcing function and I’ll post the code and all the details ASAP, but I just wanted to apologize for my relative silence on this blog and that things should get better RSN. XXOO.

P.S. I’m loving Windows Live Writer 11!