A month or two ago, I got a call out of the blue from some guy I never heard at a recruiting shop saying “I’m looking for a reference on Adam Bosworth.” I’m afraid I gave the guy a hard time, first I took him for a prankster and then I ranted at him along the lines of “You’re talking about probably one of top twenty software people in the world, have you never heard of Quattro Pro and Microsoft Access and IE 4? What are you talking to me for?” To his credit, the guy was patient and explained that this was Google and Google is different. So I told him about my exposure to Adam over the years and all the things it’s painfully obvious that he’s good at, and I’m sure the other people they called did too, and now he’s at Google. But what I really wanted to say today is, go read his latest piece, he says in one paragraph what I’ve been raving about for months in the area of Web Services: “The really useful things turn out to be the simplest ones.” How many times do we have to re-learn this lesson? Anyhow, there’s more, and it’s all good.
