From News Publisher to Production Company  Page 3 of 3       
Bookmark and Share  [At this point, the interview switches gears
and locations and moves into Steve White's office for his
perspective as chief technology officer. ]  ECONTENT: You came
in a year after launched. What were some of the pressing issues
when you came on board?  STEVE WHITE: I came in as a program
manager. It was really fascinating back then because, first of
all, we had no other model, really, than the Microsoft model of
product development, and the tradition at Microsoft of what we
called the strong PM model, which was basically PMs drive
everything through.  There was a lot of debate back then about
news. That news is not software and that running software and
the development of all aspects of the news business on the Web
can't operate like a traditional software company.
Interestingly, when I arrived, that kind of internal epiphany
had resulted in a shift towards very rapid development-actually
managing a situation where we're devel