Microsoft codenames caused by head injury

No Windows Vista advice here, I'm afraid, but it's of interest to Microsoft nerds such as myself: Mary Jo Foley has interviewed one of the old men of Microsoft, Iain McDonald, about Windows Server 2008, and points to his announcement of how Windows XP came to be codenamed "Whistler":

...it was when I was learning to jump on my snowboard – also before I used a helmet which is dumb.  I was in the terrain park on whistler [a mountain in British Columbia] – I lined up a jump & had a thought on the way onto the jump. “What will we call the next release” has nothing to do with that & thinking often is not the best idea when going for a jump. I blew the jump bad & landed on my head. This is not an experience to have - wear your helmets, kids. Lying on the ground for 10 minutes made me realize next release would be called Whistler.

Thus this moment of borderline concussion kicked off the cycle that saw the "next" release of Windows labelled Blackcomb - the next mountain to Whistler - and what would become Windows Vista was named Longhorn after the bar (pictured) that sat between the middle of them. All now lost, alas - the next version of Windows now wears the far less evocative codename "Windows Seven". It's not like the old days.



Mary Jo's interview then goes on to reveal that if you thought Windows Vista had a rough gestation, you didn't know about Windows 2000:

We finished that project and I spoke to someone who said I worked 30 seven-day weeks this year. That was someone who worked for me. I knew I worked a lot more seven-day weeks than she did. It was dumb. You should never run a project like that. In the long run, there were some great things we did, but we also made some just fundamentally stupid decisions. Like the security one. Code Red in August 2000: It’s amazing how stupid that was in retrospect. We just didn’t know.

The second half of the interview will be up later in the week. Maybe that'll reveal that Silverlight was named after a near-death experience.