Microspeak: ladder up

Raymond ChenJanuary 17, 2017Jan 17, 201701/17/17

Some time ago, I encountered a new piece of Microsoft jargon. Let's try to figure it out together. For our team presentation, we developed a theme that ties together all of the features we are working on, and how it laddered up to something bigger than the features themselves. I went searching through other documents looking for the phrase "...

Microspeak: lift up

Raymond ChenOctober 25, 2016Oct 25, 201610/25/16

Today's Microspeak is the verb phrase "lift up". Here's a citation: [After a long detailed discussion.] I want to lift up a little and talk about why this is important. I didn't know what this intransitive sense of lift up meant, and there wasn't too much context here to work from, so I hunted around for other citations. The vast majority of...

Microspeak: North star

Raymond ChenNovember 3, 2015Nov 3, 201511/3/15

I noted it in the interview with the Defrag Tools show, but I'll make a proper Microspeak for it. Today's term is North star. This term rose quickly to prominence in October 2015. My research suggests that it had been simmering below the surface for about a year. For example, here's an isolated citation from May 2015: The best you can do is ...

Microspeak: move the needle

Raymond ChenSeptember 1, 2015Sep 1, 201509/1/15

The phrase move the needle is part of general business jargon, but it is very popular here at Microsoft. You need to know what it means, and more importantly, you need to be willing to throw it around yourself in order to sound more hip and with-it. In general business speak, move the needle means generates a reaction, but at Microsoft, it ...

Microspeak: DRI, the designated response individual

Raymond ChenAugust 25, 2015Aug 25, 201508/25/15

Someone sent a message to a peer-to-peer discussion group and remarked, "This is critical. I'm a DRI at the moment and have some issues to fix." The term DRI was new to many people on the mailing list (including me), and while others on the mailing list helped to solve the person's problem, I also learned that DRI stands for designated ...

Microspeak: Headcount, req, and related personnel terms

Raymond ChenMarch 17, 2015Mar 17, 201503/17/15

For some reason, there are a lot of Microspeak terms related to personnel. (Maybe you folks can tell me how common these terms are outside Microsoft.) We start with a term that is not actually used much outside the personnel world: The Position Control Number, or PCN. The PCN represents a place where an employee could be hired. If somebody is...

Microspeak: Light up

Raymond ChenFebruary 17, 2015Feb 17, 201502/17/15

In Microspeak, a feature lights up if it becomes available in an application when run on an operating system that supports it. The idea is that you write your application to run on, say, Windows versions N and N + 1. There is a new feature in Windows version N + 1, and new functionality in the application when the code detects that the ...