Greg Hullender, where are you?
I met Greg Hullender in August at SES San Jose. He was acting msndude at the time. Recently, msndude was posting less & less on WMW and Barry noticed. I just found out today that he resigned from MSN Live Search recently. Not sure if that means he’s not with MS at all or just wanted a change of scenery within Redmond. But if not MS, it does make me wonder where he’s headed….
Greg & Matt spoke quite a bit about the two different paths MSN & Google are taking towards search. Greg honestly seemed to believe that he (MSN) was catching up and had the better long-term strategy. I wonder if Matt & Google thought there was something to that machine-learning & they went and poached another MS employee.
Greg, I wish you the best of luck wherever you end up!
Sorry I didn’t see this sooner; I took some extended time off. Anyway, I’m still at Microsoft, but I moved to the Machine Translation team inside Microsoft Research. I really enjoyed my time as MSN Dude (about six months or so), but Machine Translation has been a long-time fascination of mine, and they offered me a “Principal Developer” position.
Just in case people don’t know, Machine Translation means things like translating English to Japanese — not translating C++ to Java.)
Finally, I still believe what I said about Live Search having excellent long-term prospects, so it’s silly to think I’d approach a competitor for a position.
–Greg