• Mary Jo Foley on ZDnet
• Ina Fried on Cnet
• engadget
• gizmodo

and those are just the ones that I know of. All this hubbub is because I wrote that for people who are impressed by the iPhone, they'll be "blown away" when they see my features in the next version of Windows. Very positive message, no hating going on here.

Well, the corporate spin machine went into action and by 10pm (approximately 10 hours after I posted the blog entry), I had two messages from high-up-mucky-muck managers in my inbox. The next day, I got a visit from my direct manager, who intimated that I would be "at the bottom of any future rankings" and that this would be "unrecoverable" for my career at MSFT.  I'm like, WTF!! I wrote a stupid little blurb promoting the Dell Tablet, my feature in the next Windows (generalized, since all I wrote was "you'll be blown away...") and all of management from me through the leadership group under BillG is coming down on me like a ton of bricks!

It's no secret that a) I work on Tablet. I've been on the Tablet project since 2001, predating many of the managers above me; b) I work on the touch input functionality aka Windows Touch Technology, hello, we shipped touch input in Windows Vista; and c) I'm damn proud of the work I've done, to contribute to the Tablet PC effort.

I'm not about to let anybody take credit for the groundbreaking, and painstaking, work we've done to introduce natural input to personal computing.

I'm sorry for making the PR people scramble around Tuesday night. It's not my intention to create more work for you. But in truth, you probably had this scenario planned out as a contingency plan, if you didn't you should have. Oh yeah, you're probably reading this posting too, because I make no real attempt to hide my personal blog, even though I don't blog personal stuff on my work blog and try not to blog work stuff on my personal blog. Sorry for wasting more of your time.

I'm sorry for making the high-up-mucky-muck managers talk about me and what I wrote on my blog and what they were going to do to me, instead of their normal day's worth of meetings, of which I know nothing except that they're always in meetings. Lord knows that the nail who sticks out gets hammered back down. I take solace in the adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity"

I'm sorry for all the idiot presenters last Thursday who saw fit to make fun of me at every turn. Don't worry, I didn't attend your little love-fest. I knew better than to subject myself to that crap. But I heard about it. Repeatedly. No wonder we've got the reputation we've got for transparency and openness, we've EARNED it.

I'm sorry to the blogosphere, and all the people in Windows who are now chilled from posting interesting blog postings due to the lockdown imposed by management because I wrote a stupid little two-sentence pro-feature, pro-Windows, rah-rah posting in my obscure little blog that is only subscribed to by maybe a couple hundred people (and now, Mary Jo Foley, Ina Fried, and maybe others). I have unintentionally caused the siloization of my colleagues to be even more extreme, because they are afraid that what happened to me will happen to them. I've let you all down.

I joked last week that I've just used up my 13th and 14th minutes of fame. I got mail from my classmates in the UW Extension (shout out to Dave, Colin, Jo, et al).

I got comments on my work blog from the wide spectrum of humanity that uses personal computers. You are an interesting bunch.

All I can say is, that last Tuesday must have been slow, or else information about the coming Windows is so scarce, you need to take two sentences of nothing and overblow it into an even tighter lid on the flow.

All this, because I made the mistake of being happy for Dell, and being proud of the work I do.

*sigh*