The geek in question: Abbott Lowell

The job title: Senior Product Manager with Office, based in Beverley, MA

How did you end up working for Microsoft?
It's a long story! I used to work at Lotus Development, working on Lotus Notes. I was on a team up there a little north of Boston, working on the support side of the enterprise customers. We always viewed Microsoft as the Evil Empire, and at company meetings it was always about how we were either gaining or losing market share. Of all the places I wanted to work, Microsoft was definitely not one of them.

When Ray Ozzie left Lotus and founded Groove, no one knew quite what he was up to. It was quite intriguing, and I decided to go and see. When I interviewed, Groove was totally in stealth mode – no one would tell me what I would be working on. It was a big leap of faith. But I got the job with Groove and loved being with a small fast paced, little company -- I think I was the 103rd person hired.

Fast forward ... things started developing between Groove and Microsoft, and there was lots of concern about how we would survive. So, the news of getting acquired by Microsoft was very welcome from my perspective. It was like, "Okay, here's a milestone for this project we've been working on." But I came right out and told my boss at the time, "This has been great, and I'm really looking forward to helping you guys get this thing landed, but I don't intend to stay with Microsoft for more than a year."

But that was almost four years ago!
Yeah, needless to say, my opinion changed right away, once I saw what it actually meant to be part of the excitement of plugging Groove into Office. Suddenly it was like, "Wow, there's all sorts of interesting work here," and the people that I work with are so phenomenal. How could I leave?

What was it like going from working with Ray at a small company, and then you get acquired, and now he's Chief Software Architect for a huge software company?
There's a ton of excitement and pride about seeing Ray up there. It's amazing to see -- just the few degrees of separation between the ideas that we were very close to then, and the ideas that he is working on now. It's pretty exciting.

So, what's surprised you about working at Microsoft?
It sounds so ridiculous, but it is the thing that struck me when I started working for Microsoft was that the people are phenomenal. And as much of paper chase as Microsoft's Commitment setting process can be, it's the first time that I've felt like the company was really interested in asking me, "So what are you going to do next year? Write it down, and think about what that's going to be, and how it maps to these bigger goals." You have so much freedom to build your career and say , "here's what I'm going to work on. " No one constrains that at all. I just haven't seen that anywhere else.

How about a few links? All about Groove: blogs.technet.com/groove Abbott on Facebook: facebook.com/people/Abbott-Lowell