www.nickhodge.com

Chair­man Bill and CEO Steve have lost a valu­able mem­ber of staff in Uncle Mike. I have a dis­tinct feel­ing that product teams in Seattle will miss him more, if his­tory tells us any­thing. Nearly 9 years at Microsoft is an achieve­ment in these high velo­city career times.

Times like these trig­ger throughts and feel­ings requir­ing articulation:

• Accord­ing to Beth Wor­rall, Mike’s turn of phrase and gift of allit­er­a­tion hasn’t left him. “pro­cess is the colostomy bag of innov­a­tion” illus­trates both his off-centre (slightly black) but stark and illus­trat­ive phrase mak­ing skills. The Munge Broth­ers is dis­tinctly an Uncle Mike term, bor­rowed by mun­genet. These phrases have the abil­ity to per­fectly describe a situ­ation and cir­cum­stance that defies altern­ate char­ac­ter­isa­tion. Nam­ing your clapped-out, 1970’s era and rus­ted surf-boarding car­rier Holden sta­tion wagon DOSBOX replete with the per­son­al­ised num­ber plates sums up his sly sense of humour.
• Ad-hocery, or the lack of over-formalism and a fear of too-much pro­cess and meth­od­o­logy is an ana­thema to Mike. Throw­ing “stuff” together to solve a dif­fi­cult prob­lem is one of his strengths. “End user com­put­ing” and put­ting power into the hands of end users was his man­tra before he joined the small band at Ran­dom Access. Strict meth­od­o­lo­gists, or god-forbid, those how invent meth­od­o­lo­gies and Mike prob­ably wouldn’t get along that well. Watch out if you are in IT and don’t have a deep pas­sion for IT.
• Over ten years ago as a con­sult­ant, Mike’s phrase “a laptop and a mobile phone” clearly fore­told of today. One can work and be in touch vir­tu­ally any­where, and with a laptop be pro­duct­ive. There was a fam­ous piece of video made by the Munge Broth­ers that cap­tures this Fellini-like mood.
• A clear vis­ion of what is import­ant and what works. Some of the ori­ginal “turn­ing data into inform­a­tion” work the Munge Broth­ers presen­ted in 1991/2 and ad-hoc data retrieval meta­morphed into data-warehousing. This is an industry tech­no­logy that I use daily in my cur­rent, non-highly-technical man­age­ment job. I have no idea how I could do my job without this level of information.
• A love of art: be it music, video or still; that is off-kilter. It is dif­fi­cult to describe the imagery I’ve seen; and I think that Mike’s blog has a splat­ter­ing of these images. Sadly, it seems that its genetic as his son is now play­ing gui­tar at school.
• Friend­ship and loy­alty that spans many careers. Uncle Mike was my ref­eree for the job that lif­ted me from Adelaidian obscur­ity to Apple incubus. His loy­alty to his fam­ily in the midst of a tur­bu­lent work envir­on­ment is legendary — and he strike a har­mony that is unmatch­able. I’ve per­son­ally only seen this in one other per­son in my work­life; his name is also Michael.

Where next for the Fang? We might find him in the record­ing stu­dio as the micro-music media mogul of Adelaide or a gad­get heavy jack­aroo in out­back Aus­tralia. The fur­ther away he gets from this increas­ingly frac­tured IT industry the bet­ter. For those of us stuck on the inside, we are deadly envious.