I was following Microsoft as a hobbyist programmer ever since I was a geeky teenager. I always thought it would be an incredibly interesting company to work for and indeed it is. In the past I felt that Microsoft had lost some of the focus as it became very big and tried to do too many things. However, in recent years I’ve started seeing signs of Microsoft going back to its origins and getting back to being a leader rather than a follower. I love Windows 7, I love Windows Phone 7, I love Azure, I love Xbox and Kinect and I’m starting to love Bing. I joined Bing only three months ago after working for three years in the Telecom group in the Israel Development Center. No doubt Bing is in a unique position being almost the only competitor to the Google hegemony in internet search. This competition keeps everyone on their toes and on the radar so I love it. We keep studying our environment and we try to stay open and aware. It makes day-to-day much more exciting! I enjoy Bing because I’m always curious about new ways for doing things, especially when it comes to software. I love the Bing spirit because I feel there’s a lot of room for experimentation and trying out new things, both technically and in the development processes. When I joined Bing one of the most interesting things was to explore the vast amount of investments we make in the search infrastructure and supporting services. Microsoft is less vocal about these things but even after three months I keep discovering more and more tools and capabilities we have in the backend to support our search efforts with great ideas popping up every day. In Bing nothing is done “just because we have been doing it like this for many years.” There’s a spirit of trying to find the correct formulas and people understand that there is no “Microsoft-magic-formula” that can take us to success. I love that spirit, it requires everyone to be critical and embrace changes and new ideas. I don’t feel we have the “right” formulas yet but I do believe that we are making investments in the right places. I believe our efforts in mobile feel like a very promising direction. The Bing iPhone application is very cool and it’s a good sign seeing Google taking many of our ideas and implementing them in their app. The next release is coming up soon and there are going to be many new great and innovative features that people are going to talk about. I hope to be able to communicate about some of the feature my team is implementing in an upcoming post. I think that the most exciting thing about my work group is our common passion for the services we create and about our users. We think about them all the time and constantly aim to create more fun and better experiences. I also like that we have a lot of fun at work and we don’t take ourselves too seriously! Elad lives in Tel-Aviv where he works on Bing Mobile Signals and User Context team as a software developer. Part of his team is located in Israel Development Center and the other part in Bellevue, WA. Currently the team is working on very cool new location-based features for the Bing iPhone app, which will be released soon in the next version of the app. Please follow Elad’s future blogs for upcoming postings about new iBing app’s as they hit the appstore!