{"id":1063,"date":"2014-05-06T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2014\/05\/06\/letting-the-boss-think-your-project-is-classier-than-it-really-is\/"},"modified":"2014-05-06T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T07:00:00","slug":"letting-the-boss-think-your-project-is-classier-than-it-really-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20140506-00\/?p=1063","title":{"rendered":"Letting the boss think your project is classier than it really is"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once upon a time, there was a team developing two versions of a product, the first a short-term project to ship soon, and the other a more ambitious project to ship later. (<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/01\/22\/61647.aspx\">Sound familiar<\/a>?) They chose to assign the projects code names Ren and Stimpy, in honor of the lead characters from the <a href=\"http:\/\/nicktoons.nick.com\/shows\/the-ren-and-stimpy-show\"> eponymous cartoon series<\/a>.\n Over time, the two projects merged, and the code name that stuck was Ren.\n When the project came up in a meeting with Bill Gates, it was mentioned verbally but never spelled out, and since Bill wasn&#8217;t closely tuned into popular culture, he mapped the sound  \/r&#603;n\/ not to the hairless Mexican dog but to the Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul&#8217;s Cathedral. In follow-up email, he consistently referred to the project by the name &#8220;Wren&#8221;.\n The Ren team liked the fact that their name gave the boss the impression that the project was going to be a masterpiece of architectural beauty, so they never told him he got the name wrong.<\/p>\n<p> <b>Even though it has nothing to do with the story<\/b>: The project in question is the one that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/about\/technicalrecognition\/dinarte-morais.aspx\"> eventually became known to the world as Outlook<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once upon a time, there was a team developing two versions of a product, the first a short-term project to ship soon, and the other a more ambitious project to ship later. (Sound familiar?) They chose to assign the projects code names Ren and Stimpy, in honor of the lead characters from the eponymous cartoon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Once upon a time, there was a team developing two versions of a product, the first a short-term project to ship soon, and the other a more ambitious project to ship later. (Sound familiar?) They chose to assign the projects code names Ren and Stimpy, in honor of the lead characters from the eponymous cartoon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}