Hello, good evening and welcome. My name is Brett Roberts and I'm the National Technology Officer for Microsoft New Zealand (no there isn't a uniform and my request for epaulettes was turned down) and I thought it was about time I did my bit to contribute to the 17 trillion new blogs going online daily. I thought my first post should be introductory in nature so, for what it's worth, here's a bit about moi....

I've 'been in IT' since the early 1980's when I learned to write assembler in order to get a 1st generation IBM PC to extricate data from Air New Zealand's flight data recorders - aka "black boxes" - for testing and diagnostic purposes (it's OK, I was employed by them at the time as an avionics engineer). After that I was at CLEAR Communications (the precursor to TelstraClear) for nine months as a Visual Basic programmer and I then spent 1993 to 1997 working in a number of sales roles for Essentially Software which was then bought out by Software Spectrum (which I see is now Insight).

After leaving EssentiallySoftwareSpectrumInsight in late 1997 I joined Microsoft NZ as OEM Manager and got to spend the better part of five years working with local PC manufacturers. Since then I've worked in several different roles at Microsoft NZ which have involved responsibility for things such as competitive strategy, security and privacy initiatives, online safety, standards (including that one) and Trusted Computing/DRM.

Anyway, enough about me... rest assured things will get more interesting from here on and they'll also get better-looking thanks to my colleague Darryl's kind offer to organise an aesthetically-pleasing blog template. Oh, and I owe Nick a Speights (or eights) for hosting BRB.

Stay tuned...