Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

My headache was cured this morning

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If you follow my Tweets you will have already gotten a few hints.

  • 11-30 AM May 18th Is insanity contagious? I think I might be infected by contact with someone at work. May I take another sick day now? Please?
  • 11-39 AM May 18th I have a headache now. I almost never get headaches. Is there a pain reliever you can get OTC for reducing pain in the ass people?
  • 11-42 AM May 18th My coworker will be buying a months supply of such medicine too. Maybe we can get a discount on a bulk buy.
  • 11-46 AM May 18th Someday I will blog about this person. Other people need to be warned.
  • 10-19 AM May 19th Woot! I just got a great offer from another company. I can tell my crappy boss goodbye!

I have been told, in a very firm tone, by two different friends that I shouldn’t blog about this person by name. So, at least for now, I will hold off. But lets just say my mood has greatly improved in the last 24 hours and Barb will probably stop telling me I should take anti-depressants.

Former co-worker Chet also left Microsoft because of this guy. This morning, after I told people I was leaving, someone who also has had to deal with him came to me and said, “He is crazy! He has to be insane.” I think it is a case of Peterson Syndrome (a generic case which is probably unrelated to guns). Imagine having to deal with someone like that on a daily basis. Now imagine them writing your performance review. Yeah. I have been having nightmares for months now.

There are some things about working for Microsoft that are very good. There are other things that are very broken. Two more people, who don’t work with my boss, told me today they are looking for an exit for similar reasons to mine. Microsoft has some very serious flaws that are not being addressed by management.

My offer from another company includes a raise larger than all the raises I have gotten in working at MS for five years and a stock grant (vested over three years) that made me light-headed and made Barb squee.

I have another interview on Monday so I haven’t accepted the offer yet and I keep hoping I will get an interview at Barron’s place of work which is a few minutes from my home in Idaho instead of the Seattle area like the others I have been looking at. But the job applications there are moving way to slow for me to wait around much more. I need to get out before I just pull the covers over my head and never get out of bed.

You may notice an uptick in blog post frequency… we’ll see.

Quote of the day—Senator Al Franken

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Steve Jobs said to the press that ‘we build a database of cell tower hotspots that could be 100 miles away from where you are, those are not telling you anything about your location.’ Yet in a written statement, Apple explained that the very same data would help your iPhone calculate its location. How can those two statements be true at the same time? Does this data indicate anything about your location or doesn’t it?

Senator Al Franken
May 10, 2011
Senators press Apple, Google for answers about location tracking
[I know! I know!

While Apple is a direct competitor to my employer (Microsoft) with this product and it’s not in my best interest to defend them I feel compelled to say that in this particular instance Apple is getting a bum rap. I worked on this same feature in Windows Phone 7 and understand the problem very, very well.

The answer given wasn’t the best and that probably made it difficult for Franken to grasp the concepts. So I’ll try again. Almost for certain this is how it works. The phone obtains a collection of cell tower  locations and unique cell tower IDs in a particular geographical area. This area could be a rectangle that is 100 miles by 100 miles on a side. When the user requests their location the phone obtains the unique ID of the cell tower the phone is connected to. The ID is looked up in the collection of cell towers, just as someone’s name might be looked up in an address book. The location/address of the cell tower is then returned to the user as the best estimate of the user’s location.

As long as the cell tower IDs used for location lookup are not stored then the best that can be done by examination of the files on the phone is to see the different cell towers (and Wi-Fi) collections that were stored. As long as those collections were large (100 miles by 100 miles per collection) then the best that can be deduced is the user was someplace within that collection area. If the collection area is much smaller, say 100 feet by 100 feet (this could happen because Wi-Fi access points have much greater density that cell towers) then it becomes very important to make sure those collections are secure from snooping. If those collections are sometimes for a small geographical area and the files are not made secure then shame on Apple. They were being careless with the users privacy and should be chastised for that carelessness. But at this time I cannot conclude Apple screwed up.

So to answer Franken’s questions, those two statement can be true at the same time. The data does indicate your position within the geographical area of the hotspot locations. But that does not necessarily mean the location is know with the type of accuracy that a stalker would find particular useful–unless just knowing the city or zip code is sufficiently damaging.—Joe]

Location info—why you should care

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The iPhone (and cousins) storing of location information and similar activity by Android is turning out to be a pretty big scandal. Some people are saying, “I’ve got nothing to hide.” but most people I associate with don’t think that way. And since that guy writes for the NYT he doesn’t really count with most of the country anyway.

Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac explain the issue better than I could:

Having a data file with over a year’s worth of your location information stored on your iPhone is a security risk.

So if a thief got his hands on your iPhone, he can figure out where you live and loot you there, too. Same goes for a hacker who gains remote access to the consolidated.db file. But if a thief or hacker dug into an Android device, there isn’t going to be much geodata saved on the smartphone to digitally stalk you. (There’s plenty of other data on smartphones such as text messages, address books and so forth, but at least we have control over what data we store in this regard.)

Bottom line, this data shouldn’t stick around on your iOS device, because it does nothing but put you at risk. And you should care about that, because this problem can be and should be fixed by Apple, and you should demand that.

I’m not at liberty to say much but I will say that I spent some time explaining the security of Windows Phone 7 location services to our Program Manager and Dev Manager this afternoon. Both seems satisfied with the status. It’s not as good as I would like it to be when I put on my utopian privacy hat but I think the tradeoffs made were within acceptable bounds. I’m also pleased that at every stage through the location service development process privacy was taken seriously by everyone I worked with. I had expected I would have to fight hard at times to protect location information but that was not the case. I only got pushback on some relatively minor issues, for legitimate needs, and the compromises made were acceptable to me.

WP7 location service does a much better job of protecting your privacy and giving you control over your data than the iPhone currently does and probably better than Android. And as long as I am working on location services I will do my best to make sure it stays that way.

Windows Phone 7 update is available

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The Windows Phone 7 update for the Samsung Focus (and I think all AT&T Windows Phone 7 phones) is now available.

Copy and Paste is just one of the many new features and bug fixes that come with the update.

Connect your phone to your computer to install the update.

I Stumbled Across This Excellent Dissertation

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And it turns out to have been written by me, so I’m quoting myself.

In a discussion about capitalism, this was asked;

Does Need and Want enter the equation?
How does Marketing elbow it’s way in between Production and Consumption?

To which I replied;

Interesting question. I’d say that need and want are omnipresent in all interactions, but the basic equation is still the same. That production necessarily precedes consumption is obvious, whether or not the goods or services being consumed are both needed and wanted, or merely wanted. Each individual should be free to decided what he wants or needs to produce, what he wants or needs to consume, with whom he will trade, and how, in order to reach his goals. That includes the form of communication we call marketing.

Marketing is as old as humanity. Actually that’s a short sighted statement, because marketing, usually by males to potentially receptive females, has been going on for millennia in other species. Not sure where you’re going with that. I make widgets and want other people to buy them. They’ll never know I have these widgets available unless I advertize in some way. Often that advertizing is as difficult and expensive as the actual production but, just like the colorful feathers on the peacock, I can’t continue without it. If I believe my widgets are superior to widgets made by other producers, it is my want, my duty and my need to explain that superiority. That’s the communication between producer and potential consumer. That enables products of all descriptions to receive trial in the free market. The best performers will in the long run and overall, tend to win out over the lesser performers. Even products some people hate may do very well if there are enough who like them.

To the extent that the producer wants to produce and trade, and to the extent that the consumer wants and/or needs the product, marketing helps both.

If your thought is that marketing can and does steer people in directions they should not go, I would agree in many cases, though interference in that process can only have further negative consequences. Right at the start, legal interference denies the freedom that is the ideal in our society. Ultimately people are responsible for their personal choices, and reality will be the judge.

I may not like what some people spend their money on, I may not like the products some people offer, and I may not like how some people market their products. In a free society, that’s my tough luck. Everything has its costs, and the cost of liberty is that people I dislike may do things I dislike, so long as no one’s rights are being violated. Maybe instead I should find something to worry about that I can actually change. If I believe in my position passionately, I should have the freedom to get together with like-minded individuals and a) do better marketing of my own of a better product, or b) do an ad campaign of my own, warning others of the pitfalls of that other guy’s marketing. If I’m telling the truth, too bad for the other guy, and good for his unsuspecting customers. If I’m lying, he can sue me for defamation or some such, or his customers may ignore me.

The good thing about a truly free market (something no one alive has ever actually seen, by the way) is that people are free to make their own decisions. The bad thing about a free market is that people are free to make their own decisions. Our founding principles and documents acknowledge this dichotomy and uphold it as the ideal.

There are those who would put us in a situation where other people are making our decisions for us. That’s just trading retail bad decisions for wholesale bad decisions, with brute force being the operating system as opposed to free choice and rights protection. We know where that leads.

Quote of the day—TJ

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Google isn’t so much a company as it is a programmers cult.


TJ
A programmer at Google
April 6, 2011
[I talked with him for over an hour. He had me convinced the above assessment is correct. Their culture is very different.—Joe]

Must. Bite. Tongue.

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I so want to comment on some things that I see in the press about Windows Phone 7. Especially the problems with the remote update feature.

Maybe someday I can tell the stories. But not now.

Sorry

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I haven’t posted much recently. Things have been pretty rough at work recently and I haven’t had much time or energy for blogging or even reading other blogs.

Yesterday, in an effort to improve things, I (figurative) threw a couple Molotov Cocktails. Short term things will be a mess but long term it should help clean things up.

Don’t expect a lot of posts until after Boomershoot 2011.

Finland sounds nice

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Background material: Recently Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership for mobile phones. I work for Microsoft on mobile phone software. The home office of Nokia is in Finland.


Earlier this week I had to travel on business to San Diego. Shortly after I left there was a pretty major snow storm in Redmond, the Microsoft campus was partially shut down and a lot of people couldn’t make it in to work and/or chose to not risk travel on the icy roads. Many decided to work from home (WFH) which is encouraged by Microsoft.


I drive a 4×4 with studded tires all the way around and frequently walk to work instead of driving anyway. I like seeing fresh snow on the ground and don’t have a problem with it as long as it is not so heavy that falling trees take down the power. Even that is usually only a minor annoyance because I just leave and go to my home in Idaho and wait for the power to come back on or come back with my 3000 Watt generator. What’s the big deal?


With that background here is an email thread which occurred in our work group while I was out of town:



From: Chet
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:07 AM
Subject: WFH


I will WFH today.


From: Haitao
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:23 AM
Subject: RE: WFH


Same here.


From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:30 AM
Subject: RE: WFH


I’m going to work from San Diego today. It is currently 55F with lots of  sunshine.


I wish I was in Redmond so I could enjoy the snow too but I’m stuck here for at least a few more hours.


Sent from my Windows Phone


From: Michael
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 9:03 AM
Subject: RE: WFH


Don’t push it or the next trip could be to Finland.


It was a long time ago but I did read and remember the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch.



From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:18 AM
Subject: RE: WFH


Finland sounds nice. When do I leave?



Sent from my Windows Phone

New Windows Phone Ad: What if?

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The featured phone is the same one I have and that I gave wife Barbara and daughters Kim and Xenia for Christmas. Barb explicitly told me not to get her one (after I had already bought it). But now she uses it all the time. She plays games on it, she listens to music with it, sends text messages, and she can even check the weather and make phone calls with it. She has thanked me repeatedly since Christmas for getting it for her even though she thought she wouldn’t like anything “too complicated”. It’s not complicated.

It is also the same one that son James and his fiancé Kelsey have. I evaluated all the Windows Phone 7 available just before Christmas and the Samsung Focus edged out all the others with it’s bright display, the camera, and the sound quality. Others apparently agree because from what I’m hearing it is a very, very popular phone.

Full disclosure—I work for Microsoft and I wrote some of the software that goes into this phone.

Quote of the day—Pete Cunningham

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It’s a big win for Microsoft today. Windows Phone 7 is no one’s priority. But now Microsoft has a leading vendor committed to use the platform.

Pete Cunningham
An analyst with Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England.
February 11, 2011
Together, Nokia and Microsoft Renew a Push in Smartphones
[It’s a big bet. But when we had an all-hands meeting about it on Friday morning everyone seemed pretty pleased about it. There will be lots of work in involved but the rewards should be large too.—Joe]

Epic WP7 feature win

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Since I’m on “The Location Team” for Windows Phone 7 I sometimes get feedback on location usage and applications that use location information. The story below came in today and it brought tears to my eyes. I asked Afshan if I could post her story and she graciously allowed me to do so:

From: Afshan A
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 2:49 PM
To: Windows Phone ALL – Users & Enthusiasts
Subject: Epic WP7 feature win

WP7 Team,

Here is a story of my WP7.  It all started 45 miles away from Bellevue in Snoqualmie Pass where I enjoyed the best day of skiing with a bunch of friends in fresh powder. We left the resort in high spirits, talking about the highlights of the day when I decided to reach for my phone. I searched my empty jacket but no luck. I thought, not a problem at all, it is probably in the bag pack but still no luck. Umm, over here? Empty. We were almost half way back to Bellevue. I called my friend who was in a separate car. We were on the slopes together and she borrowed the phone from me; probably she forgot to give it back, but still no luck.

Slowly the realization grew into an empty black hole devouring all happiness – I just lost my new phone. (Ok not that long, but along those lines!). The worst part was I didn’t have a clue where I dropped it. The question was is it alive or dead?  I started cursing myself that things could have been different if I would have not been so over confident about being a responsible person and purchased the phone insurance. But well some things in life happen for a reason. We seem to gain wisdom readily through all failures than through our successes.

While I was blaming myself in the car, one of my friends suggested that I should try using ‘Find My Phone’ feature to detect the phone location. At last! a sign of hope. The other iPhone user friend in the car goes ‘You can’t use that feature unless you have subscription. At least that’s how it works for iPhones’. After hearing this conversation back and forth I didn’t lose hope. After all I’ve had the phone for a short time and I wasn’t ready to give up. This was simply not acceptable.

As soon as I reached the friend’s house who was driving, I immediately logged in to my live account and desperately looked up the option for ‘Find my Phone’.  Within a few seconds I found this life saving feature and clicked on the button to detect my Samsung Focus location co-ordinates on Bing maps. Keeping my fingers crossed for the longest 30 seconds of my life, hoping I don’t require subscription and boom, I see the results. The phone was resting at Snoqualmie Pass 250 yards from interstate 909 road. This was such a  relief. Even if I don’t recover the phone, at least I know what happened  to it.

When my friend saw my crying and helpless face, he offered a ride back to the resort. He was also an owner of WP7. Almost after 1 hour of driving, we got there. Now all we had to track the lost phone was through a memorized picture of Bing maps in our brains… around 9pm on a Sunday night in a closed ski resort, leaving us in the frigid cold and pitch dark slopes. You could see the clouds surrounding the moonlight and even random flurries. We had no option but to search by stumbling around the ice and snow within the area of what Bing map was showing with the help of our flash light. Immediately an idea popped up that why don’t we just detect the friend’s WP7 location co-ordinates and then compare the two pictures of the map and track it from there. My friend called another friend who had access to a PC and asked her to log in to his windows live account to detect his phone’s location co-ordinates. You can think of this friend at home as a control tower. Once the CT had the two pictures in front of her she was able to guide how far we were from the lost phone. How much further we need to move and most importantly in which direction. 50 yards north. 24 feet east. 20 more steps uphill. Every time pausing and hearing nothing but the dark silence. Finally we reached a point where the two pictures looked identical with a minimal difference to CT and we just started to ring the lost phone. Carefully listening to the sound of darkness, looking at 360 degrees and then , wait, is that… THERE, LIGHT!!! I rushed towards it, and yes it was, MY PHONE!!! IT WORKED!!!

As I rescued my dear phone from the bitter ice, it greeted me in character –the pink home screen boxes nonchalantly indicating I missed only 19 calls and 123 messages, I realized there were multiple factors that made this possible such as having a bunch of geeky friends full of ideas (who work for Microsoft), the lost phone not running out of battery or not getting crushed by other skiers on the slope and mother nature didn’t let it rain during the full 3 hours phone was resting on the snow ground. And that it landed right side up!

I think this is a proud and successful story of Windows Phone 7 which has helped me rediscover my vision of technology and how it can make a difference in your day to day life.  So Thank You WP7 !!

EpicWP7FeatureWin

Afshan A.
Microsoft OEM Finance | Business Excellence

Cut-and-paste coming to Windows Phone 7

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Via eWeek:

Microsoft is also planning a smartphone software update that will address a separate issue related to Exchange ActiveSync e-mail synchronization. Other updates, reportedly scheduled to arrive in coming weeks, will tweak application-loading speed and introduce a cut-and-paste feature.

I know a lot more and could tell you about cut-and-past and lots of other features but that would be infringing on territory of the marketing guys.

Update: A reader sent me an email saying, “I’m pretty sure it’s just copy and paste. AFAIK ‘cut’ isn’t there.”

I think I would argue that we are both right. But that discussion will have to wait until the update actually hits the streets.

‘My Gunsmith Says…’

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I’ve put off saying this for about ten years, but it’s gotten to be too much.  “Sorry” to you good gunsmiths.  I know you’re out there.  I’d say that you know who you are, and I’m sure you do, but the problem is; the bad ones also think they’re the good ones.  They’re super good, even.  That’s always the way it works.  I began to realize this some time in the 1970s when I was in the early stages of my career as a musical instrument mechanic with an alternate career as a live sound mixer (“technician” or “engineer”, respectively, for those who feel it needs to sound exciting and hard to reach).


The really smart sound engineers could quote you all the specs of every piece of gear they had.  They could recite from memory the center frequencies of all 31 bands of a graphic equalizer, for example.  After they had everything all set up and the system response tweaked using the pink noise generator with the front-of-house EQs, monitor EQs and active crossovers, when the performance actually started (which is when the real job of actually making it all sound good actually begins) they’d turn around satisfied, sit down, and have a sandwich and a little chat about sweet nothings.  Man, those guys were really smart, and they often made sure everyone around them understood that they were smart.  Why, they went to college, and stuff, don’t you know?


It seems we get an inordinate proportion of failed or stalled UltiMAK mount installations, an inordinate number of misunderstandings of how the system works, from, you guessed it– gunsmiths.


Apparently, they know and understand far too much to be bothered with reading and following the instructions.  Even when they contact me about this or that perceived problem, they are too smart to accept my explanations.  They, you see, understand mechanics better than the person who designed the system, built the first prototypes using hand tools and common power tools in a musical instrument shop, did the majority of testing, wrote most of the patent claims, and used the system for over ten years.  They tell me all the reasons why it can’t possibly, ever work, why my hands-on experience is wrong, why the experience of over ten thousand users of a single model is all wrong, and how I’m being a dumb jerk for suggesting they might just go ahead and follow the simple instructions to the letter anyway and then see how it goes.


Since an inordinate number of damaged mounts have come from such gunsmiths also (again, because they are smarter and more experienced) I have to wonder how many of them go on to become politicians, city administrators, professors, or left wing community organizers.  There is an uncanny set of parallels.

Not that there is anything wrong with that

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Via Greg Hamilton’s Facebook Wall Photos:

MacUsers

And a quick reminder than my attempts at humor do not in any way represent those of my employer (Microsoft).

Order to buy

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Microsoft’s Kinect is doing quite well and may soon be a sex toy as well. People that don’t quite “get it” when it is described to them end up spending hours playing with it when they try it. People at work are complaining of sore muscles and some are even seeing the doctor for before coming back to work after a long weekend of dancing and jumping around in front of their televisions .

Windows Phone 7, particularly when running on a Samsung Focus, is getting a lot of praise and sales are going well for it too.

We have a little bit of money left over from some recent financial shuffling and I put in an order to buy a little more Microsoft stock.

*I’m a Microsoft employee but any “insider” information I have isn’t worth what ten minutes of searching the web would gain you.

The view from north central Idaho

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I knew the big snow storm was coming and rather than make a trip back to the Seattle area last Sunday I stayed in Idaho and worked from home the first part of this week. This saved me two trips over Snoqualmie Pass and 600 miles of travel on slick roads.

This was the view from my “office” on Tuesday:

IMG_4268Web2010IMG_4270Web2010

These are from Thanksgiving day at my parents and brother’s place (they live a couple hundred feet from each other):

IMG_4291Web2010IMG_4297Web2010IMG_4304Web2010IMG_4292Web

The picture below is also from Thanksgiving day on the farm and is to supplement this post. This is the old pull type combine parked behind the barn I was talking about:

IMG_4299Web2010

Google and privacy

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Via email from Chet:

In the past I have said I don’t mind private business getting overbearing as much as I do the government doing so. But when an industry leader uses the invasion of your privacy to it’s advantage without repercussions the rest of the industry is almost forced to follow along or get left in the financial dust. And once the technology is deployed and a profit can be made selling it to the government someone will do that too. It won’t matter how evil it is (read IBM and the Holocaust), if the price is right, and with a government involved the price could be you (or your company) continuing to survive, the information will be abused.

There needs to be repercussion for companies who do this. The “noise” and the boycotts need to start before the information is abused.

I know a lot more than I am at liberty to say and it hurts to bite my tongue this hard…

Note: Full disclosure—I work for Microsoft who is a competitor of Google.

Windows Phone 7 sales are good

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Microsoft is being closed mouthed about the sales numbers for Windows Phone 7 but the indications are that it is doing well:



Early reports hint that Windows Phone 7 has been selling strongly in international markets, with DigiTimes reporting in a Nov. 3 article that sales of HTC-build Windows Phone 7 smartphones are better than expected in Europe and Australia. In the U.K., news outlets reported a lack of available phones through carrier Orange.


“Early supporters of the new operating system such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are also experiencing rising demand from carriers,” suggested the DigiTimes article, which sourced its information as unnamed “Taiwan-based handset makers.”


TheStreet.com, citing an unnamed “market research source,” reported some 40,000 Windows Phone 7 devices sold in the United States on the first day of release. Neither Microsoft nor AT&T offered exact figures when contacted by eWEEK, although an AT&T spokesperson said the carrier was “encouraged by early demand from customers in stores and online.”


Microsoft employees (such as myself) were asked to not purchase new WP7 phones for a few days so the local stores would have phones in stock for the general public.


I haven’t decided which one I will get yet and I don’t really have a strong recommendation at this time. I have three “engineering units” in hand which I have been using for quite some time and will get my personal phone within the next few weeks.

People are ‘really’ interested in lingerie

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My previous post on the Windows Phone 7 advertisement posting generating lots of search hits on my blog for information about the woman in lingerie generated still more traffic on the topic.


On November 2, the day before yesterday, searches about the woman wearing lingerie in the Windows Phone 7 advertisement constituted over 91% of all searches on my blog. 984 (actually this is a little low because my spreadsheet doesn’t account for some misspellings) out of 1078 search engine hits were with searches containing (“window” OR “phone” OR “lingerie”). A visual scan of those searches confirmed all those hits were because of an interest in “girl”, “woman”, “brunette”, or “hot chick”.


I guess it must be true that sex sells.