July 20th, 2016

Microspeak: Tick-tock

As you might imagine, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the opening day of //build. For //build 2016, my job was to publish the new samples to the Github repo. And //build 2016 was when I was introduced to the term tick-tock:

Please review your items in the tick tock from a timing perspective and send me any corrections. Visual Studio is pivoting on the conclusion of the keynote, and our plan is to update the SDK as soon as Update 2 goes out.

The attached document was a spreadsheet that listed the chronology of events, along with other information like the task number in the task database (not shown here). Something like this:

Order Go Live Event Owner
1 9:00am Keynote begins
2 9:00am Publish Bunion home page Alice
3 9:00am Publish Bunion SDK for download Bob
4 9:30am Halitosis Update 2 released
5 9:30am Update Halitosis home page Alice
6 9:30am Update Halitosis download page Bob
7 9:40am Update Halitosis redirects Charles, David
14 10:40am Eat the donuts before they go stale
(not available on Skype)
Bob
15 11:00am Keynote ends
16 11:00am Publish Windows developer blog post Ellen
17 12:00pm Visual Studio Update 2
18 12:00pm Publish Windows SDK for download Bob
19 12:00pm Publish Windows SDK redirects Charles
20 12:00pm Publish Github samples Raymond

I think it was nice of Bob to remind people to eat the donuts. I was not in the room, so I lost out on the donuts.

The items in red are external events we have no control over, but they act as signals for us to proceed with the next steps. Therefore, everybody had to keep an eye on their prerequisites to make sure the steps occurred in the right order. (I’m guessing the term tick-tock evokes the idea that when the prerequisite action ticks, the dependent action tocks.)

Anyway, it wasn’t as crazy as this.

Another tick tock document I found covered a Windows launch event, starting three days before launch and continuing through two days after launch.

I had difficulty finding good citations for tick tock, mostly because the phrase is too common to be searchable. One document I found was kind enough to provide sort of a definition via context:

Attached is the Contoso Launch tick-tock document which includes the timing, execution instructions, coverage, and links to detailed guidance.

The timeline was not down to the minute like the one I had. It covered a campaign that took a month to play out.

Anyway, from what I can gather, the term tick tock is used to refer to the schedule of events surrounding a product announcement.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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