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History - Steven Kovitz, Compuvision and the World...

30 years ago I believed that the future was in desktop computing.  It was.  20 years ago I believed that the future would grow out of Microsoft Windows 2.0.  It did.  15 years ago, I went to work directly for Microsoft and was there for 6 years.  At that time, I believed that most custom business software should be based on Microsoft Office.  I still do.

I was personally recruited by Steve Ballmer to be one of Microsoft Consulting Service’s first in-the-field experts on all aspects of solution development using Microsoft Office (especially Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Word), Microsoft Visual BASIC, VBA and Microsoft SQL Server.  This covered everything from large scale database designs using SQL Server and stand-alone application development using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access to a wide variety of custom applications developed using VBA and Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Word.  Applications that I have designed and/or written myself have been rolled out to up to 20,000 users worldwide.

As a related area-of-expertise, I was also a member of Microsoft’s User Interface Design Group and performed usability testing and lab set-up for a number of clients.

When I was with Microsoft, I was also a critical part of the development team of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual BASIC.  One of my primary job functions was to take my real-world experience back to the development staff in Redmond for a few weeks each year so that we could shape the upcoming versions of these products to handle what was most important to our largest customers.

My skills in the areas of database development, program development, project management, user interface design and general business processes and cash-flow have helped me lead a number of projects involving coordination among groups of technical and non-technical people.  Most of my work has related to the manufacturing and financial industries.

Since leaving Microsoft I have continued to develop the same sorts of application for a wide variety of clients.  I have developed dozens of applications using one or more Microsoft Office programs, combined with custom programming in VBA and tied together through custom templates, forms, menus, toolbars, etc.  These normally are multiple user applications, possibly with a SQL Server or Microsoft Access database at their core.  Of course, sometimes all that’s needed is to get companies to correctly use the built-in power of the Microsoft products that they already have.  It is not uncommon to discover companies that have built custom programs to do an “almost good-enough” job of something that actually was a built-in feature of the product that they were already using.  I have also developed a large number of stand‑alone custom programs using Microsoft Visual Basic .Net.

It is important to note that while most of my database experience involves Microsoft products, core database skills such as data modeling are product independent and I do have experience with most of the major database products of the past 30 years – everything from dBase II to DB2, including Oracle, Informix, HP’s Image/3000, dbVista and others.

Since leaving Microsoft, I have taken on a number of special projects for a variety of customers, including DTE Energy, Daimler‑Chrysler, Bold Funding and even Microsoft Corporation itself, involving various combinations of Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (including Microsoft Visual BASIC .Net), Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

I have also worked on a number of projects involving true home networking, i.e. personal video servers, telephony, appliance control, CEBus, etc., as well as other real-time systems.  In January, 2007, Microsoft announced the Windows Home Server, which will support many of these same technologies.

I have been earning a living full-time developing programs for microcomputers since the TRS-80 Model I.  I wrote a number of articles for The Alternate Source Journal, the leading technical publication in the TRS-80 world, as well as developing a number of programs that were used and/or marketed by The Alternate Source.

As someone who understands technology trends, I was one of the first to move to the IBM PC and then to Microsoft Windows.  With the release of Microsoft Windows 2.0 and Microsoft Excel 2.0, I made a full time commitment to developing programs for Microsoft Windows.  I was using both Microsoft Pascal 4.0 (I was the one) and Microsoft C, as well as Microsoft Excel for program development.  I also became a retailer for a number of early products that supported the Windows platform.

One other project during this time that involved developing a pre-internet eBay type system using Borland’s Turbo Pascal with a DBase II database that ran in a series of networked public kiosks.