So I finished tweaking my interview with Jensen Harris. Thankfully, this one was under ten minutes long, which means I could upload it onto YouTube! I’m encoding the Jensen Harris interview in 720p right now, but if you don’t feel like waiting, you can either download it in 1080p or watch it via YouTube.

• Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager for the Office User Experience team at Microsoft.
  Jensen and his team work on the user experience behind Microsoft Office. They came up with the Ribbon UI, which many see as one of the best things to come to Office 2007 since spell check.
  

The biggest lesson you can learn from this video is to opt into the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Do it, seriously. It makes later versions of Office, Windows, etc. better for everyone. They don’t collect anything that can be traced back to you. They just collect things like which buttons or UI elements get accessed + how often, which functions are performed + how often, and other non-traceable things. No file names are collected. No file contents are collected. It’s all perfectly clean.

Corrections have been made to the previous two interviews. Feel free to update your copy (sound fixes on both interviews as well as a minor correction to the content of the Tim Harris interview). Sadly, I can’t upload those two to YouTube due to time constraints. The Jensen Harris video can be watched after the jump.

Update: I uploaded the 720p version for those who are interested.

Update 2: I switched to Vimeo as the video host since they allow for much higher embedded video quality. You can skip downloading the video if you want to watch it in 720p. The video enclosed after the jump isn’t in HD, but it is in HD over at Vimeo. (more…)

Most of my time with MIX so far revolved around interviewing influentials within Microsoft. Yesterday, I interviewed Tim Harris and Chris Wilson. They are both from vastly different areas within Microsoft, as you can see from the interviews themselves.

• Tim Harris, Program Manager for the Platform Strategy Team at Microsoft.
  Tim plays a huge role in event logistics. Just about every major Microsoft event (think MIX, PDC, WinHEC, etc.) is an event which he and his team play a huge role in planning and coordinating.
  
• Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer.
  Chris is deep within the nuts and bolts of Internet Explorer, as is likely implied by his title at Microsoft. He has a heavy hand in the design and development process behind Microsoft’s web browser..
  

The codec used for the videos is the DivX codec simply because of how fast the codec encodes the footage on my rendering box. Want the codec? Click here to download it from the DivX home page (avoid installing the crapware) or simply grab it as a part of many of the freely available codec packs (be careful with these).

Update: The Chris Wilson and Tim Harris interviews have been fixed. Feel free to re-download either