Kirk Glerum was a longtime Microsoft employee who joined the company in 1987 as a software design engineer. _Glerum spent most of his career at the Redmond software working on Office. _Glerum is well known as the father of codename “Watson,” an error reporting system that helped developers fix bugs, which originally debuted in Office. _Glerum is now semi-retired and with Windows XP support ending today he shared the story of how Watson came to Windows: Microsoft officially, finally, and truly, ends support for Windows XP today. Windows XP was the most important OS of my Microsoft days. Really, it was the most important product of my Microsoft days, even though I was an Office guy the whole time. In ’98, while working on Office 2000, I came up with the idea of ‘Watson’, for the forthcoming Office XP. Instead of just having Office apps (Word Excel etc.) crash and burn, they would crash and report. They’d still crash, oh my yes, but us geeks back in Redmond would receive...

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