- Excel Group Program Mgr
- Inventor of the scroll wheel for the mouse
- MSN Communities Product Unit Mgr
- #1 stack-ranked Program Manager across the entire company, 1995
- more...
Eric's Page
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Software Current Work: Updating A Vestigial Metaphor
Today's GUI's basic metaphor is documents on the desktop. This is unchanged since the
very first GUIs in the late 1970’s. The Xerox Star and the Apple Lisa presented this metaphor.
At the time it made a lot of sense since these systems were explicitly targeting office automation, and so documents on an electronic desktop matched the functionality being offered and users’ conceptualization of what they were doing. But these days, usage of PC’s has gone far beyond documents on a desktop. Usage today centers around communications, sharing, and web access. The current metaphor is vestigial and provides little benefit. WorldView is a new approach.
Earlier Product Reviews
"Silverado is a BMW with cruise control"
-- BYTE
"One of the best new ideas I've seen in a long time"
-- InfoWorld
"Reflex: Software With Good, Clean Sex"
-- InfoWorld
"Absolute, canned elegance."
-- Dave Winer, InfoWorld
"To the first-time user... once he’s learned it, he’ll say,
‘Well, isn’t this what software is supposed to do? It makes everything clear.’
Experienced users are more likely to be properly grateful."
-- RELease 1.0
"Reflex' simplicity of operation and power is simply not available in other programs.
It is extremely well designed and thought out. It is not only fun to work with, it’s addicting. "
-- PC Report, A publication of the Boston Computer Society
"So what makes Reflex tick? Why is it such a hot product?
It has to do with the way Reflex allows you to work with data."
-- Whole Earth Software
"Silverado is one of the rare products that provides substantial power with a
reasonable ease of use"
-- Computer Currents
"All in all, Silverado is a wonderful database add-in. Its reporting features
are quite sophisticated and its database outlining feature seems unique and important."
-- InfoWorld
"One of the best new ideas I've seen in a long time."
-- Michael Miller, InfoWorld
"Budget Express, the newest add-in and one of the best of all time...
one of them said that it brought tears to his eyes"
-- Corporate Finance
"People who do budgeting just go wild when I show them"
-- Lotus Magazine
Past Affiliations
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Talk Know Your Carbon Footprint?
Here's a list of carbon calculators available on the web. All let you figure out your personal carbon footprint
(to varying degrees of specificity) and/or sign up for actions you can do to reduce your carbon emissions. I'm working
with a couple of groups here in Seattle to produce a collaborative community-based utility for helping people to reduce their
carbon emissions. Hopefully it will get done...
The short story is that I invented the scroll wheel on the mouse. More specifically though,
I invented the use of it -- for document navigation --
rather than the wheel itself. Several years earlier, Apple got a patent for a wheel on a mouse but gave no
indication that they were thinking of it for document navigation.
Here's the history of the project.
Watching the contributions, good and bad, that different individuals made to projects I've worked on led me to
formulate a set of factors that would summarize in numerical form a person's contribution.
The MCI does that.
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| Eric Michelman | ericmic:at:hotmail.com | 425-702-8547 |