I've been traveling for 2 weeks now, and today head back to Santa Cruz via SFO. I am looking forward to being back in the Mountain View campus (my next travel is Feb 19th, so I will be on site for a few weeks).
Reflecting on this trip - Dulles->Bangalore->Dublin, I come back to my "All about the people" jingle that I often say, and probably cause some eyes to roll. But it really is - we've got some really good people in many locations working on great products and services.
Dulles - the team working on community has really focused and shipped updates to AIMPages, Message Boards, AIM Host, Web IM's etc. For a group that previously was not focused "on the web", I say 2006 was great example of focusing on the Web areas, learning new skills and delivering. AIMPages has ways to go - but it's adding 5000 + profiles per day now -- up vastly from beta 1.
BDC is fairly new to AOL, but just being there a week, you walk away with the impression that it is humming, and the people are really "into" the work. It's challenging being so far away from headquarters - with many teams not collocated, it does make it harder. However, I was impressed by the teams there, and look forward to future visits.
Dublin office is great - and reminds me a little of Mountain View. Lots of history, and great products built from this location. I was bummed out a bit, since I was sick last night and was not able to join in the visit to the local pub. Maybe next time....
So it is all about the people. Without you, we have just a bunch of code that can't ship itself, certainly can't qa itself, and the UI would be just plain awful. And the schedule, well that would be out of the window.
Happy Wednesday
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