Programming Windows: Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek Interview (Premium)

In January 2004, Joseph Jones and I interviewed Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek, two of the key figures involved in the design of Longhorn. Both were then members of the Windows User Experience team at Microsoft, and they worked on some of the company's more advanced user interface projects over the previous several years, including MSN "Mars," Internet Explorer/shell, Windows "Neptune," Windows XP, and then Longhorn. We were also joined by Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan.

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Tjeerd: I started at Microsoft in 1994 as a product designer. My background is in industrial design and engineering. The key disciplines for product development that we have at Microsoft include product design, user research, program management, development, test, and UA (user assistance); at times we call it UE (user education) as well. UR is user research. Typically, the key team that is driving the design of features includes one person from user research, one person from product design, one person from program management ... they try to get the plan together for what the product needs to do, and how it's going to do that. That design helps them develop a spec, which they give to the development teams.

I started with a product that was called At Work. We worked on printers and copiers and scanners.

Tjeerd: Yeah, we did too, but it never really panned out. A little while later, that was canned and part of the kernel actually became Windows CE over time. So I went to [the Office team] and started working on a little bit of Office 95, Office 97---it was originally going to be Office 96, but it slipped a year---and 2000, and I did early [work] on Office 10, which became Office XP later. And then I moved to Windows.Paul: Right. I always thought [At Work] was a great idea.

Paul: So you're not the guy responsible for all the crazy proprietary Office interface stuff, are you?

Tjeerd: Command bars?

Paul: Yeah. Every version of Office has some unique UI that doesn't exist anywhere else in any other Microsoft product.

Tjeerd: Right, well yeah, basically yes.

Paul: I think we need to talk.

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: For example, I did File Open/File Save, and stuff like that. And I did command bars.

Paul: You're command bars?

Tjeerd: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Hillel: Go ahead, give it to him, Paul. Lord knows I have.

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: Aww, it's not too bad. I wasn't responsible for writing the code ...

Paul: It's even worse if you're responsible for the vision of it …

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: So... [Turns to Hillel] He hasn't mentioned the Office Assistant yet, so that's good.

Hillel: That's not your fault.

Tjeerd: No, that wasn't my fault, that's true.

Paul: But arguably, you let it happen.

Tjeerd: I was there. I did vetoes of it. But I do still maintain that the Office Assistant isn't the terrible idea that people make it out to be. Actually, it's just the way [that technology] was used by many teams was w...