I’ll never forget the day the world stopped. I picked up the phone and heard: “Hello. This is LCA. I’m calling to inform you that you are the subject of a formal investigation into anti-trust violations.”

At that point, everything got blurry. I think I forgot to breathe for a few minutes. I was in shock.

I had a few encounters with Microsoft lawyers that were, in a word, scary. But in a good way. Every time I worked with them, they were hardcore on following the law, and I greatly appreciated and respected that. 

A Microsoft engineer (the awesome .Net Perf architect, inventor of the phrase “Pit of Success”, and now Distinguished Engineer Rico Mariani) recently told me he used Copilot to script a way out of a laggy system. He was delighted. The story triggered a memory from the early days of PowerShell when my diplomacy was clearly … pre-operational.

When I put together the core concepts of PowerShell, I was committed to solving the boof-a-rama that is Windows CLI syntax.  Prior to PowerShell, any developer that got at least a ‘D’ in a course on parsing was allowed to inflict their damage on the user community.  This incoherence caused a great deal of confusion as users struggled to navigate at least four distinct syntax groupings:

I have a lot of conversations where teams toss around the concept of Product Market Fit (PMF) like it’s a vibe. We all pretend to get the gestalt of it, but usually, we’re just guessing. Here are explanations my teams have used over the years:

Is your Hair on Fire?You have PMF when the customers are buying the product as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing as fast as you can add more servers.

How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?If at least 40% of them answer “very disappointed,” you have reached the threshold. Anything less means you are building a toy, not a necessity.

Since I got involved in angel investing, I learned the cold truth from my fellow investors:  PMF is MATH!  

In response to my blog Welcome to the Room, Davor Vukovic asked the question:

I might be mistaken, but don’t the required resources result from defining a theory of success (i.e., the solution)? My understanding is that you first define a plausible theory of success and then evaluate it against the available resources, not the other way around; then adjust.

A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella

When I was Promoted to Technical Fellow, I was “invited to the room”, joining Microsoft’s other Senior Executives.  It was really something. Achieving the Senior Executive status is often mistaken for a comfortable reward, a final destination with enhanced perks and support. A more  fitting analogy is reaching the NFL Super Bowl. You are now part of an elite team where nothing less than peak performance is acceptable. As the Navy SEALs put it, “The only easy day was yesterday”. You can feel that energy when you walk in the room. 

I didn’t know what to expect but what I got changed my worldview and my life.

Bad things happen when you are grounded in the real world.  Ergo, in systems architecture, we constantly look for feedback loops. Negative feedback loops provide stability (like a thermostat). Positive feedback loops provide amplification, but without a governor, they inevitably lead to system runaway and collapse.

You know the story of the Golem of Prague? The Rabbi builds a protector out of clay. It works great until it doesn’t. In engineering terms, the Golem failed because it lacked a governor—a negative feedback loop. In systems architecture, positive feedback loops without governors don’t just grow; they run away and tear themselves apart. That is exactly what it appears we are building with this circular financing of AI where capital flows from Big Tech balance sheets into startups and immediately flows back as revenue.

I’ve spent a lot of time, and acquired a lot of scar tissue, in this industry, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that most people are terrified of looking different. People hug the center of the road because it feels safe. But as Jim Hightower once said, 

“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

When we were building the early versions of PowerShell (back when it was Monad), we had a massive fight over a single word. It seemed trivial to everyone else, but I knew it was a hill worth dying on. It was the fight over the word Cmdlet.

The disagreement wasn’t a matter of wordsmithing; it was a foundational issue about establishing the cognitive contours of the product – how people would think, learn, find things, and form a community. It was an issue of soul.