Roundtable with Microsoft S Somasegar

Last week, on the 11th of March 2005, turned out to be a rather special evening for me. I got to meet and spend time with S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft. The occasion was a small roundtable that Microsoft India had arranged with Soma for a select group of Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and one Regional Director — me — from Chennai.

I had first read about him nearly a decade earlier in the book Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT by G. Pascal Zachary. After that, his name kept coming up — always with admiration — from Microsoft employees I met over the years. I had crossed paths with him in person twice before: first in September 2000, when Bill Gates launched MSN in India, and again a few months before this, at a community roundtable in Microsoft’s Bangalore office, where Eric Rudder was also present. But last week was different — for the first time, I actually got to sit and talk with him at some length, on topics that I genuinely found interesting.

He is an active blogger, and his blog is one of the most heavily commented developer blogs around — which makes sense, given that he oversees some of Microsoft’s most exciting products, including the upcoming Visual Studio 2005.

At one point during the roundtable, I asked him how he finds the time to blog at all — I myself have to squeeze these posts in late at night, as I am doing right now. He said he simply made a firm decision to do it when he started blogging about a year back, and has stuck to it. Most of his posts, he added, are written from home in Redmond, and he rarely gets the time to write during trips like this one. Then I asked him something I was genuinely curious about — how does someone in a senior role at Microsoft decide what to blog about, what to leave out, and where to draw the line? I half expected him to sidestep the question. He did not. Without a pause, he said: “It is simple — apply common sense.”

Later, when the conversation turned to Visual Studio itself, he said something that has stayed with me. He described the challenge of shipping a product as complex as Visual Studio using a simple image: think of a triangle with three edges — features, quality, and time. You cannot have all three in full measure. In practice, you can firmly control only two of them, and the third one has to give way. His own approach, he said, is to hold firm on quality and time, which means some features have to be moved to the next release.

What struck me about this was not the idea itself, but how plainly he said it. Here is the person responsible for one of the most widely used developer tools in the world, and the constraint he is wrestling with is exactly the same one that a small software team in Chennai wrestles with every week. Good ideas have a way of travelling well, and I suspect I will find myself repeating that triangle to someone sooner or later.

It was also interesting to learn that Soma did his undergraduate degree at Guindy Engineering College, Anna University — not far from where we met on that day. That small detail made the whole evening more special.

Update — 20th May 2026: Soma passed away yesterday. I wrote a tribute to him that also tells the story of this triangle and what it has meant to me over the years. Read it here.