From the Editor’s Desk: Running in Reverse (Premium)

This year has been … interesting. And while it may seem a little early for a retrospective, I’m calling it. I need the rest of 2023 to pass without any more change. It’s just too much.

And it’s not just change. Much of it is change that in many ways feels like a step backward, an unexpected return to something that was … but had passed.

For example, I spent much of last week in Seattle, and the rest of it traveling to and from Seattle. I was there for Microsoft Ignite, the once-massive in-person industry conference that I’ve been attending for so long that it used to have a different name, TechEd. And the thing is, I shouldn’t have been there.

Like so much else in this post-pandemic world, Ignite is different now. It used to be Microsoft’s biggest annual show, by attendance, with 26,000 people visiting the hellhole that is Orlando for the 2019 rendition. But thanks to COVID-19, Microsoft canceled its expected return to New Orleans in 2020, a trip I was really looking forward to, and held “digital” (online) Ignite events that year and in 2021. In 2022, Ignite returned in a diminished state, at least from an in-person perspective, with about 2500 people attending the hybrid show in Seattle and a much bigger audience enjoying the keynotes and sessions virtually. This year was the same hybrid format, albeit with more people—about 4,500 attendees, I was told—and a longing hope, discussed incessantly by everyone I encountered, that next year, maybe, just maybe, things could return to normal.

But there is no such thing as normal anymore. And while I hope I’m wrong, I’m not sure we’ll ever see a return to the Ignite of old. Seattle doesn’t have the conference center or hotel infrastructure to support such a crowd, though to be fair, there are only a few cities in this country that do. And Microsoft isn’t immune to the same financial realities that hit those of us on the outside during the pandemic: When you stop paying for something like work travel, you get used to not footing that bill. There seems to be little enthusiasm for flying and housing thousands of Microsoft employees for a week each year when most of them can just stay in Redmond, saving the company untold millions of dollars.

While there is much nostalgia for what my Windows Weekly co-host and friend Richard Campbell calls “the before times,” I think there might be a happy middle ground between the heady days of liberal work travel and the stay-at-home nightmare of the pandemic era. And Microsoft may have already found it: I hear there are plans to add a series of smaller, focused, and regional shows, like how things were before Microsoft consolidated things into its three big tentpole shows, Build, Inspire, and Ignite: This would save Microsoft lots of money on travel and would bring live events to more people. What goes around comes around.

For me, this year’s Ignite felt exactly like my three previous and much smaller work travel experiences this year, each of which involved driving to New York City either for the day or for a single night. That is, I felt out of place, like a 20-year-old hanging out in front of his old high school because he missed the camaraderie of what he suddenly realized was his happiest time in life. I’ve felt this weirdness in the past, actually, on those occasions when I attended non-Microsoft events where everything was familiar but all of the people were different. But in this case, I knew many of the people. I just hadn’t seen them in years.

This was both delightful and horrible. My last major Microsoft event and work travel experience before the pandemic, at Ignite in Orlando in November 2019, was much like all those that preceded it, a heady time of reunions with people I care for—both inside and outside of Microsoft—meetups, work meetings, and nights out. A blast, in other words. But in the four years since—seriously, four years—I got comfortable not traveling so much. And those in-person reunions turned into distant, virtual, social media-based interactions that were sporadic and less human.

Not surprisingly, it was wonderful seeing old friends again in person. The smiles, the hugging—so much hugging—the catching up. It was a terrific reminder and perfect example of how important the in-person is, how the virtual can never replace it, and how a balance between too much and too little, especially when it comes to travel, can never be achieved. I get teary-eyed just thinking about it. I flew home Friday, and it already feels like it happened weeks or months ago. Like it happened to someone else.

But this trip was also horrible because people change in four years. They don’t evolve in your mind if you don’t see them regularly. This is most obvious with kids—the children of my friends and relatives are all frozen in time to me but are now all going off to college, getting married, and growing up. You know, as people do. But my friends from Microsoft are not immune to this effect either. Many of them are senior executives now, in charge of massive teams of people, and some are literally vice presidents and corporate vice presidents. They are ceding stage time to their younger coworkers and direct reports, stepping back from the limelight. Some are literally coasting. And some are gone, either because they retired recently or were laid off in this year’s insensitive and impersonal pogroms.

Many moved away from the Seattle/Redmond area. This is something that shouldn’t have confused me, but did at first. But each explained their rationale, that the post-pandemic hybrid and remote work changes made doing so possible, as did their kids growing up and heading off to college. This is, of course, exactly the type of change my wife and I made during this time too: We had traveled to Europe regularly each year for decades, but in the post-pandemic world, we bought an apartment in Mexico City and everything changed. My friends were as curious about that as I was about their own unexpected—to me—changes.

Related to this, we moved—for the second time this year, no less—this past weekend. It went well enough, though the word “move” does nothing to describe the work that’s required. But aside from all the obvious issues with moving twice in one year, and the Groundhog Day-like nature of doing so, this move, like my halting return to work travel, feels like a step backward too. And on multiple levels.

The first issue is that the condo we moved into is one block away from the development we lived in previously, in Lower Macungie. We sold our house there in March, downsized dramatically into a small apartment in Macungie, and now we’ve moved back to Lower Macungie, to a place that is bigger than the apartment but still much smaller than the house. And … I’m not as happy about this as you might think. Coming back to this area feels like a regression. I mean, we were done with this area. And being here again, it’s weird.

The second issue is that I really like Macungie, we both do. It’s much more of a blue-collar community than Lower Macungie, a lower-income but friendlier, smaller, and more welcoming place. In just 8 months there, we felt like we became a part of the place, made several friends, and would regularly see many others on our walks, especially. We have a new favorite restaurant that was a 5-minute walk from the apartment, one we will still visit regularly, that’s now a 10-minute drive. That’s not bad, I know, but it’s also not the same as being in the neighborhood. Lower Macungie is less geographically remote than Macungie, and I won’t miss the additional drive times to and from the Newark airport and to the many places we visit routinely in the area. But I felt at home there. Lower Macungie is more central, but it feels more remote than Macungie, if that makes sense.

I don’t know. I had made a mental break with this area, I guess, and in driving back here again and again in our pre-move trips, I started almost resenting us coming back. I have no nostalgia for this area or our old house, a place I never even drove by after the move (save for having to pick up a mis-delivered package). But I will miss that apartment, how quiet it was there, and how nice our neighbors were, and I will especially miss the trains that went by at all hours, musically tooting their way through the intersections. It’s only been a few days, but I haven’t heard a train in Lower Macungie yet. And if I do, as I did sometimes at the old house, it will be wistful and remote, something off in the distance. Which is how I feel right now, actually.

It will be OK. But if there is one truth to this move, it’s that it, like all things, is temporary. We’ll move again, as soon as next year—it all depends on the health of the woman who owns this place and the needs of her family—and we’ll wind things up yet again. We’ll see what happens, and when. But I might be going back to Macungie. I’m already thinking about it.

Ah well. It’s time to unpack.