At this year’s South by South West Festival (Burning Man for geeks), former Microsoft design director Tjeerd Hoek made an appearance as a panelist on the session titled “How to Create A Kickass In-House Design Team”. The full-length podcast recording has been finally released just a few weeks ago. It is definitely worth listening to if you have an interest in design, working in an in-house design team, or some insight into how Microsoft Design worked.

Tjeerd, for those who don’t know, was the Microsoft design director for Windows until April this year. He was largely responsible for managing the entire Windows design process including Windows Vista from start to finish. Alongside Tjeerd was a host of notable design directors from Google, Intuit and Hoover’s.

The panel was focused around “in-house design teams”, that is design groups inside a large organization dedicated to serving the design needs of the entire organization. Microsoft’s in-house design group is appropriately named, “Microsoft Design“. As such, Microsoft Design is responsible to design not just the user interface but every aspect of user experience including notably packaging and brand for most Microsoft products.

One of the many interesting facts Tjeerd points out is that in-house design teams don’t charge other internal groups (19:50min). Whilst that might sound very trivial, it reveals the problem of undervaluing the work being done. Because there is no transaction of money involved from the design group to another group, the work process and result is not valued as much which might lead to overloading the design team with unnecessary tasks, preventing more visionary strategic design. It’s not hard to imagine this being the case at Microsoft Design.

Ironically near the end of the session they discuss how to prevent losing key people in a design team. Of course a few weeks prior to this panel, one of the most reputable Microsoft designers, Jenny Lam, had left to join an ex-Microsoftie startup. Then a few weeks after, Tjeerd himself left Microsoft to join a reputable international design agency, Frog Design. Perhaps someone at Microsoft should have took note.

At the Influence Forum 2007 in Australia, AMD Australia’s technical manager Michael Apthorpe suggested the upcoming “Fusion” architecture for a hybrid CPU/GPU design on a single chip design will offer (at the time of release) similar graphics performance and capabilities to those mid-to-high-range graphics cards today.

Still expected to ship between late 2008 and early 2009, initially Fusion will be targeted at the integrated value space for UMA-based notebook systems. Because the integrated market is very price sensitive, the price point will be quite low, but perhaps still marginally higher than current integrated alternatives. In return, notebook users will enjoy considerably better graphics capabilities and performance for the cost difference.

The question of motherboards capability was raised by the audience to which Michael stated AMD are currently looking into possible backwards compatibility but suggested it will most likely require a new motherboard.

Ever since eBay bought Skype back in 2005, there’s been wild speculation on how eBay will integrate Skype into its services. Today eBay Australia’s head of community and PR Daniel Feiler said there are no further plans to integrate Skype into eBay’s auctions or communications services beyond what is already capable to include Skype buttons in auction listings.

During the “living online” session at the Influence Forum 2007 in Australia, Sarah Stokely from lifehacker asked the question if and how eBay plans to extend the Skype integration into eBay. Another attendee also noted how eBay doesn’t even use Skype to provide customer support services.

It sounds like eBay doesn’t really have a plan for Skype, or at least not in Australia. However Daniel did note there are particular regional eBay markets where Skype has a much higher rate of adoption.

One journalist also had a personal issue with PayPal which he felt was suitable to share with everyone in the forum.

This is David Hall, consumer product marketing manager from Symantec. You might be wondering why he looks like he wants to inflict harm on somebody. That’s probably because he does.

The person David is looking at is Kim Brebach, who runs an Australian technology marketing firm whose clients includes ESET NOD 32 – a competing antivirus product. But Kim didn’t compare products, Kim spoke the truth and that is a majority (if not all) of “anti-stuff” products suck and it’s easy to blame the users for less-than-optimal security products in the past.

Kim also had an interesting spin on the viral “if operating systems were airlines” joke, “if antivirus was airline security”. It went something like, everyone had to be body searched and scanned which took an incredibly long time before even getting on the plane. Passengers would be forced to sit on the tarmac practicing emergency drills over and over again. The plane would have two seatbealts instead of one. After the plane eventually takes off, if you wanted to go to the toilet, a stewardess would tell you that might not be a good idea and they’re not liable in the event of an accident. All whilst knowing there is still a 10% chance the plane might be hijacked.

Besides Kim, other panelists included Michael Greene from PC Tools, pictured above who I’m not sure if was looking directly at me the whole time; and Mike Cohen from Computer Associates.

All of them spoke highly of an emerging but long foreseeable trend of behavior-detection-enabled security softwares. In contrast to the largely signature-based industry where threats are analyzed after they are made public, behavior-based security software has the potential to detect malicious activity as it’s happening, rather than reactive after it’s already happened (once).

The example one presenter used was a bank robbery. Traditionally, in a signature-based system the security guard would fingerprint everyone who comes into a branch to detect known criminals. The problem with that is that the person needs to have committed a crime before to be a criminal. In a behavior-based system, as soon as a person draws a weapon, the security is aware of the motive to rob the bank.

The severe drawback is that behavior based systems are more system intensive, just when you thought signature systems were enough load. A hybrid mix will be the optimal solution for now and the near future.

As a result of the Australian government’s recent decision to distribute a free internet filter, a discussion of a “public-funded” security system also emerged between the panelist and audience. Could it be possible and would it be productive to establish a multi-government-funded and publically owned security software company that distributed free security solutions for everyone?

Unfortunately we were out of time to argue that one out, but it seemed like a lot of journalists should definitely consider a career change into security consultancy by the feel of it.

At the secret gathering of journalists, freelance writers, vendors and a few bloggers they call Influence Forum 2007 hosted by Media Connect, the CEO of ICANN Paul Twomey, who happens to be Australian, gave a deep insight into what he and his organization thinks of the internet’s current trends and issues over lunch.

At least trying to talk when he could between the occasional down-pour.

ICANN for those who don’t know is not just a personal motivation acronym, in fact it is the non-profit organization which oversees the assigning of internet domain names and IP addresses. However Paul reitterated many times that in fact they do not control the internet. No one controls the internet.

Because I’m not skilled enough to eat and write at the same time, I only took some rough notes of what he said.

• Paul mentioned and gave some weighting to the network neutrality issue in the United States
• Australia has made a significant contribution to ICANN, if not the largest contributor per capita.
• There will be a move from “person-to-person” to “machine-to-machine” internet.
• Experimental implementations of IP technology involving cars with IP addresses, every component in an aeroplane with IP addresses, washing machines and electricity meters.
• Geo-location and geo-indexing capabilities, especially in VOIP with emergency services being able to locate where you are.
• Voice-based access to network, to reduce barriers to technology.
• Integrating video gaming-like experiences into services. Example he used was Keyhole/Google Earth, how it was almost like a game.
• Future growth areas: home security; downloading videos, music, books; pre-recorded television content.
• Device interaction – placing sensors on common objects such as trucks to record environment data (rainfall, temperature).
• There will be a cold war between attackers on the internet and defenders.
• Operating systems are a troublesome source of problems.

Paul recommends Australia, commonly perceived as laggards in internet technology, needed to improve in three areas.

• Universal access, including speed.
• Resilience against cyber attacks.
• IPV6 adoption to run in parallel with IPV4 in the foreseeable future.

For 30 minutes, the “internet” was a big topic to cover so I think Paul did extremely well. Duncan Riley has a more in-depth article on Paul’s fascination with virtual worlds and gaming-like experiences on the internet.

Making spoof videos would definitely top the list of talents by Microsoft employees. Here’s a dated but rare video staring the infamous (and now disbanded) MSX design team who worked on the Windows Codename Longhorn project.

This time they poke fun at the user experience decision making process for Longhorn, what would become Windows Vista. Starring from left to right, Tjeerd Hoek – design director for Windows, Greg Melander – visual design lead for Longhorn; Cees van Dok – lead product designer; Mark Ligameri – design manager & creative director for Longhorn; and Chris Guzak – senior architect for Windows.

“The shell really doesn’t do that much.”