Well with all this hoopla surrounding Microsoft Silverlight, and the question of the product’s name origin, I finally decided to get down to the bottom of it…and it was perfect timing that my Community-Credit prize package from January and February arrived today. Earlier this evening I managed to get in touch with David to ask him first hand about it and was quite surprised at the answer.
With all that said, Congratulations David! It’s a great feeling to have your last name attached to a major product – but let me warn ya…it’s not always a good thing and can be hard to get over when “your” product fails...remember what Bill said about Microsoft Bob after all!
Allow me to explain – see in the early 1970’s Chevrolet decided to honor me with a car – it was a pretty neat idea and being such a youngster not even old enough to drive and all I was pretty stoked…
Well I don’t have to tell you how that turned out. Poor production quality, corrosion, and a poorly built engine doomed my automobile line so that by 1977 it was done…no more. Forbe’s even put me on the “worst autos ever” list (Steve Forbes and I eventually worked things out and there’s no ill will between us now)
I was a little depressed that my auto line “crashed” so to speak. What helped me recover from that episode was dear old dad reminding me that we still had our Cerwin-Vega! line of quality audio components. “But dad”, I interjected, “it’s a ‘Cerwin-Vega’ – I want something that’s purely Vega.” I remember next he mentioned something about “Adventure, excitement, a Jedi craves not these things” as he walked away…and only years later did I understand the true meaning of that when the Soviet Vega space program launched Vega 1 and Vega 2 on missions to Venus.
As cool as it is to have a rocket ship (two even!) named after you, I still couldn’t help but think “Dad – those are *Soviet* space craft” – and he told me to relax because they liked the name and besides their empire was going to crumble soon anyways. Dad could sense that two failures so close together might really crush me (with my failed auto line in the 1970’s.) so he told me about the real crown jewel of the Vega family…the star…a *real* star and a bright one at that…only about 25 light years away! That really did it for me – because having a star named after you is so cool! And I was the first kid on my block to have one named after me – even before I was born! And just think in another 11,993 years Vega will BECOME the North Star (a little nugget for all you astronomy buffs out there). Just think of that next time someone says “What good is having a star named after you? After all you can’t take it home or nothin”.
Anyways – after finding out I had a STAR, I was pretty content. I mean it’s cool and all that the European Space Agency contacted me about placing my name on their new launch system in 1998 and of course when Quentin and I were talking about character plots back in the 1990’s he wanted to name a couple of characters after me for his movies…which I agreed to, but had to give him static about making those characters bad guys….
So I guess the whole point of this posting is two-fold David:
1) it’s congratulatory (with a warning that 1st generation product naming may not go well…but there’s always more) and
2) it’s me saying to you – “Hey that’s cool and all, but do you have a STAR named after you?”
And while I’ve not made my mark as a Microsoft MVP or ACE, I have heard rumors related to my overwhelming enthusiasm for the .NET Compact Framework...the next generation of .NET CF is said to be code named “Vega” Go me!