Remember, the term Microspeak is not tightly scoped to mean jargon used only at Microsoft. It's jargon used at Microsoft more often than in general usage. Today, it's a term that you really need to master if you want to talk with others about project planning. To book a feature is to commit to implementing the feature, including assigning resour...
In standard English, a tenet is a fundamental belief held by a group of people. At Microsoft, the term tenet is used as a generalization of what we previously called taxes: Things that everybody has to do in order to be a good software citizen. While taxes are typically very low-level and specific, like supporting roaming user profiles or mult...
Bubble up is the name of a soft drink, but at Microsoft, it means something else. (Remember, Microspeak is not just terms used exclusively within Microsoft, but also terms used at Microsoft more often than in the general population.) To bubble up information is to expose the information at a higher reporting level. For example, you might have a ...
A great word to use at Microsoft to make it sound like you're one of the cool insiders is pivot. Mostly because the meaning of the word varies from place to place, so you can use it to mean whatever you like while still sounding hip and jargony. In Windows Phone, the term pivot is a technical term which refers to a type of control that lets user...
Virtual team. But it's a real team, nothing virtual about it.
The verb phrase touch base is in general business jargon use, but it's quite popular at Microsoft. To touch base with someone is to contact someone in a lightweight and mostly-informal sort of way. In other words, it takes the form of a piece of email or a brief office visit rather than a formal meeting with an agenda. Bob, can you touch base w...
Today's Microspeak word is granular. Here are some citations. Please bring your cost estimates at the granularity of 3, 5 or 10 days. The archive function archives all data older than the date specified. Is there a way to get the archive to be more granular than just a date? Our database covers multiple accounts, and we'd like to choose a diffe...
Every year, Microsoft invites its employees to fill out a poll which asks questions regarding all sorts of things. One of the things Microsoft employees are asked to evaluate is whether they think that their vice president is acting planfully. The tricky part about that question is that nobody knows exactly what the word planfully means. Merriam...
The metaphoric use of the term radar is in general use. It refers to the set of things that some entity is paying attention to. (That entity being the owner of the radar.) At Microsoft, the metaphorical radar usually belongs to a specific person or group. You might forward an email exchange to a person or group with the message "Just wanted to ...
In Microspeak, a turd is a graphics glitch which results in old pixels appearing on the screen when they shouldn't. Perhaps they are not being erased properly, or instead of being erased, they move to an unwanted location. The source of the problem could be failing to mark a region for redrawing after something changed, or it could be that the draw...
