That said, Zack’s score on a standardized test caused the school administration to send us a letter suggesting he could be assessed. The assessor determined that Zack is “academically highly gifted” and he was invited to consider Lowell. At first I didn’t think he should do it: I really value the international program at Stanford, that Zack and Amelia can walk to school together and with their neighbors, and that he seems totally ok. Why fix something that doesn’t appear broken?

But as we started thinking about the option, I learned some things about Zack. He really likes math. He kinda likes Japanese but not immersion. He finishes class exercises quickly then retreats into his head to invent games. He’s outgoing and social, and gets along best with kids from chess club. The cool kids pick on him sometimes. In other words, he might learn more and fit in better at a school where there are more kids like him.

Zack made this choice pretty easily. I asked him if he wanted to go and he said simply “Yes.” I needed a bit of time to give up the old vision I had of the kids learning a language together at the local school with their neighbors. The one thing I’ve learned about parenting, though, is to be flexible. I think Zack has made a great choice.

Diana Fenster Freeland has crossed the Pacific Ocean in a sailboat a dozen times. She’s sailed from her native state of California to Hawaii, on north a few times to Alaska and Canada, and once south to Palmyra Atoll in the Line Islands. Each crossing requires over a week to cover at least a thousand nautical miles of open ocean. She enjoys ensuring the boat is provisioned with enough food and water to cover the expected duration, plus extra in case of emergency. As she says, fulfilling the role of nurturer is typical for women of her generation (born March 22, 1944). But she has also pushed herself beyond this typical role: she is a licensed Coast Guard Captain; Staff Commodore of Berkeley Yacht Club; and during ocean crossings can keep her laptop, GPS, and navigation software functioning on a quirky power supply, with, needless to say, no online help.

This dichotomy defines her life: on the one hand she embraces the role of traditional nurturer, while on the other hand she uses her talents to break traditions. Diana believes she belongs to a transitional generation. She became an adult a bit too early to benefit from the changes brought by the boomers and the feminist movement, but nonetheless shared in that movement’s aspirations. She was valedictorian of San Mateo High School class of 1962, and was head editor of the school’s paper. As a result, she saw a possible path for her life: matriculate to Columbia, start her career as a journalist in New York City, and rise to become editor of a leading publication. Instead, she stayed near her family and followed her high school sweetheart Jim Freeland to the University of California. She did it gladly, and earned honors while studying English and History. But part of her wonders what would have happened had the pre-boomer culture encouraged more women to pursue careers.

As it was, she married Jim at the end of her junior year in 1964, and worked to finish her degrees while he was deployed as a naval aviator on a carrier in the Vietnam War. Studying at Berkeley in the mid-60s was not easy. Anti-war protests rocked the campus, and it was sometimes a challenge just get to class. She remembers wearing small naval aviator wings in support of her husband at war, and being heckled and spit on by some protesters.

Diana completed her degrees early and joined Jim in San Diego. They shared a bungalow on the idyllic island of Coronado, enjoying the camaraderie of fellow naval aviators and their wives and girlfriends. It was a time of many good memories: beach bonfires, cocktails, bridge, Pacific sunsets, rock and roll, and motorcycle rides.

Eventually Jim left the navy and joined United Airlines as a pilot. They had two sons, Neal in 1970 and Ryan in 1971. They bought a house in Oakland in 1973, struggled through the recession of the mid-70s when Jim was furloughed, and then moved to Hudson, Ohio in 1979 when he was rehired. She enjoyed raising her sons, teaching them to cook, to do their own laundry, and to embrace the values of tolerance and respect (for example, banishing the term “chick” when referring to girls). She also recognized what they each needed academically, guiding them to outstanding high schools – Neal to Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio and Ryan to Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City, Michigan. Professionally, she served as a non-profits arts manager, running the touring company for Cleveland Opera, and the Oakland Youth Chorus once she and Jim moved back to California in 1989.

Diana says her greatest achievement has been raising two self-sufficient and successful sons. Characteristically, she understates her impact. She is a quiet and ardent leader whose aspirations and example helped spur a movement that changed opportunities for women. Her impact may have been most profound in her family, but it has resonated far more widely. She might say she was born too early to really impact the feminist movement. Instead, she was one of its many brave navigators.

Jim, Diana, Neal, Ryan Freeland aboard Ariel

Ariel, Santa Cruz 52

Pacific Cup, Summer 2002, San Francisco, CA to Kaneohe, HI

~12 hours from Kaneohe with emergency tiller installed

Photo by Paul Kamen

It’s hard to believe how far search at Microsoft has advanced since we launched this program in 2007. Back then our share was in persistent decline, we were trying to link the search brand to Windows (at one point calling it Windows Live Search, which really confused people), and we had a relatively modest marketing budget. Although the core product had improved quite dramatically, most of our attempts to tell our story by buying media felt totally feckless, like shouting in a storm. We didn’t have enough money to break through, and since search seemed “solved” no one cared anyway.

We needed to try something different, so we decided instead to invest our marketing budget in what we called an “Engagement Platform.” Rather than buy a fleeting media impression or rent an inbound click, we decided to create one-to-one relationships with our users, turning them into members of our program. We realized to do this successfully we needed to make the program fun and entertaining, so we entered the casual games category and embedded search into the experiences. Instead of just claiming “our search is good”, we put fun little challenges in front of people and then let them use search to help solve them. People spent hours playing the games, using our search, and experiencing the brand, in the process learning “hey, this search product actually works!”

One of the other unique things we did was to power the Engagement Platform with small rewards, giving people an even stronger incentive to spend time with our search games. Each time people played the games and did searches they earned tickets which could be redeemed for prizes. Fun, entertaining, rewarding, and useful – the perfect combination of benefits to support a strong value proposition. We launched in May 2007 and the program immediately grew 100 times bigger than our highest expectations, dramatically impacting our share. No wonder the program lasted five years.

Games was only the start of our vision. We named the program Live Search Club instead of Live Search Games because we saw the Engagement Platform as the start of a broader loyalty program – membership in the club has its rewards. We aspired to expand the incentives beyond just doing searches as part of playing games and also include regular, everyday use of our search. I spent a lot of time with a vendor development team I hired to ensure we engineered the platform correctly to support this expansion. For me personally it was a lot of fun, and helped to define a fairly unique set of skills: I could do both marketing and engineering, and discovered that I could create powerful ways to combine these skills to drive positive business goals.

After the launch of the Club I left Microsoft for a few years and worked at a couple of start-ups. In my absence the program chugged along successfully even though it never really got a push to fulfill the broader vision. But the vision lingered, and in 2010 my previous manager Derrick Connell (now our Corporate VP) recruited me to come back and launch Bing Rewards. This is the program the Club was always meant to become, and we’re pretty happy with the results. So while nostalgia makes me a little sad to see the end of Club Bing, I’m happy to help the vision continue to grow and contribute to the success of Bing.

• A fair fighter, but expect more fighting. After 10 years, the US government ended antitrust oversight of Microsoft. The market has changed quite dramatically in the past decade, and there are now three primary ecosystems: Windows (Microsoft-led, PC focused, very open), iOS (Apple controlled, phones/tablet focused, very closed), and Android (Google organized, phones/tablet focused, kinda chaotic). Microsoft has some amazingly brilliant and competitive people and I’m looking forward to what we can do to innovate and win. We’re known as one of the most ethical companies in the world (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are not on the list, by the way), so we’ll fight fair, but expect to see a lot more fight. A favorite example: aggressively defending our patents and earning $5 from every Android device.
• Windows 8 goes Metro. A new version of the flagship product is coming out in 2012. What I’ve seen (and I’ve only seen what the Windows team has demoed to developers and media) is really cool, especially the Metro design for the tablet. We’re late to the market, so it won’t be an easy fight, but expect to see progress.
• Bing gets more social. Search is about helping people make decisions and get things done. Finding facts is helpful, but historically people have relied on “word of mouth” advice from friends and experts to make decisions. Imagine how much better search could be if Bing had a map of people’s friends and their interests. Facebook has this data. They’re not sharing it with Google, but they are with Bing. Look for Bing to expand our social features in 2012.
• Xbox grows on the whole family. I love my Xbox even though I barely play hard core games on it anymore. Instead, the family uses it for video streaming (Netflix), music (Zune), and playing games together (Kinect). We don’t have cable, and rarely watch live TV. We are the future of home entertainment, and as the core Xbox gamer audience matures expect to see Microsoft perfectly positioned to capitalize on this secular trend.
• Windows Phone: #3 but in the game. With the Mango release last fall the company finally has a great phone. While we probably won’t make much progress in the US, we’ve got a strong partnership with Nokia which dominates Europe and where new phones and marketing will make progress in 2012. RIM (Blackberry) is fading badly, so this year we’ll at least get a lock on #3. A modest goal but a realistic one for the year and keeps us in the game.

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

1. M83, Hurry Up We’re Dreaming. A double disc album (does that mean anything anymore in a digital world?) from French band that is consistent all the way through. Raconte-Moi Une Histoire is fun one to listen to with kids. We Own the Sky is also good and has had more air play.
2. Elbow, Build a Rocket Boys! Lippy Kids is a favorite.
3. Bon Iver, Bon Iver. 10 songs named for geographic places in the world. Being from Seattle, I like Wash. (video shows the coast, perfectly captures the feeling of surfing in the Pacific Northwest).
4. We Are Augustines, Rise Ye Sunken Ships. Book of James is a favorite tune, recorded in a church.
5. We Were Promised Jetpacks, In the Pit of the Stomach. Love the Scottish accents, crazy band name, and driving sound. Circles and Squares is a great song.

All these bands and albums were discovered through KEXP, and in particular via DJ John Richards. Zack and I got to meet him and his son Arlie this summer.

And one more favorite: LMFAO, Sorry for Party Rocking. Best tune: I’m Sexy and I Know It. As a swimmer I’ve got to respect a band that can bring Speedos to mainstream culture, and this song has a fantastic chorus: “Wiggle-wiggle-wiggle-wiggle-YEAH!” Plus it’s very danceable.

Happy New Year!

War is horrible. It destroys property, lives, and leaves the survivors scarred. However, under some conditions war is justified, and may be called a “just war.” For example, in 1967 Israel was surrounded by the mobilized forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Rather than wait to be attacked, Israel initiated a pre-emptive strike against the Arab air forces and achieved victory in a just six days.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction, which was the principal casus belli for the Iraq war, rendered it an unjust war. By the time George W. Bush was re-elected in November 2004, 18 months after we invaded, it was very clear that we would not find these weapons. As a veteran I love my country and am a patriot. But I also believe in accountability. I have therefore always been very disappointed that my fellow citizens re-elected a President who started an unjust war.

Maya Alleruzzo / AP

Cons

• Not smooth. The processing feels jerky at times, and the transition between apps, screens and even pages while reading digital books is not smooth. Too frequently I also need to tap twice in order for the screen to register my touch.
• Bad bugs. While shopping in the store I tried to place a shirt in my cart, but each time I picked the size the color reset, and when I picked the color the size reset. Another time I couldn’t put a book into my cart. Both times I ended up having to go to the PC to complete my actions. Since the goal of a subsidized device is to increase shopping attach, these seemed like a significant fails.
• Does Silk browser make a difference? At the launch event I was most intrigued by Amazon’s investment in creating the Silk browser, which caches pages in their cloud and is supposed to deliver faster browse experience. If it does, I didn’t notice.

Pros

• The kids love it. The app store is filled with lots of content that the kids love. This was the primary reason I bought the device, and it’s paying off. Some of their favorites so far: Fruit Ninja, Everlands HD, Kids Match ‘Em, Chess.com, and the ubiquitous Netflix (also on our Xbox). They’re also finding things they like in the Prime video catalog.
• I’m shopping more on Amazon. I’m not a shopper. My savings plan has always been to simply avoid buying things, and then when I decide I want something I just buy it without a lot of price comparison. With the Kindle and Prime I’m now finding things and just having them shipped to me. For example, I’ve always loved Kudos bars, handing them out at work with coffee gift cards whenever someone does something helpful. We used to get these at Costco or QFC, but both have stopped carrying them. Now I can get them at a great price, and whenever I run out just re-order from my Amazon history. Simple!
• Cloud Player is easy to use. I easily uploaded 5 GB of songs to cloudplayer.com and my music was then available for streaming on the device. A neat feature, and I thought about upgrading to $20 a year for unlimited music storage, but I prefer Pandora, Zune Pass or Spotify subscription services (only Pandora app available).
• Lending library is cool. I was doubtful that this feature of Prime would be useful, so was delighted when I found Hunger Games in the library. A friend had just recommended the book as a quick holiday read, and I was all set to buy it when Kindle told me it was available for free. Plus the Kindle is a great reading experience. Very cool.

Bottom line: At a mere $200, I found myself very forgiving of the cons for a first generation device. I bought the Kindle to have another portable screen for the kids, and to invest myself more in Amazon’s shopping experience. It has done really well on both these primary use cases.

Zack and Amelia with Kindle Fire (Cormac loves it too)