Saturday morning, less than a month after I started this site, I took the following screenshot off of the stats page:
Wow. That is incredibly gratifying, folks. It helps, of course, to have a hot product like PowerPivot to talk about.
But this means a bit more to me than you might think.
This summer, my ex moved to Cleveland with the kids, which meant that I was soon to follow. After a career of developing “big box” software while employing a heavily “in-person” style, suddenly I was across the country and wondering how I was going to remain in the game. Cleveland is not renowned for big-box software development 
Much of that remains to be seen – I’m still with MS, still part of the PowerPivot team, and we’re still figuring out the best fit for me going forward. But it’s a good kind of uncertainty now.
I was worried, leaving Redmond. I’m not worried anymore. In fact I have not felt this recharged in years. This site, and the people I’ve met through it, is a HUGE part of that. If I end up leaving MS at some point, this site goes with me, which is why I am here instead of on MSDN. This is very much my personal creation, and at my expense. It’s worth it.
And hey, I got to take a cross-country roadtrip with the kids. How often does that end up feeling like the practical thing to do? Truly a once in a lifetime experience:
The PowerPivotProgeny
So… thanks folks. I’ll keep working to make this place worth visiting. You keep sending comments and questions
Thanks,
-Rob
Rob,
You are building very informative site with lots of good information, so visitors will come. PowerPivot was just released to first public beta last week, so having 10k pageviews when there are not that many real life PowerPivot implementation is a great thing!
Thank you for sharing all that knowledge and best of luck to you!
Vidas Matelis
Thanks Vidas
You are also running a great site, I’m glad to be a member of the club 
Did you check that 10,000 views was from the same IP Address? Just kidding
I wish you the very best for the future…with whatever decision you make.
Yeah, my bot must be working well eh?
Thanks Colin. Very kind.
Now get back to your critical self before I start to wonder if you have gone soft
great work Rob, MS should do this as a company all the time when releasing a new product it enhances partner participation imho. I would have stranded long time ago weren’t for this blog. Keep it up
Rob,
Great work with the blog! I too am an all-around data enthusiast specializing in BI solutions using Microsoft technologies. I stumbled upon PowerPivot several weeks ago and can’t wait to start working with it – I think the BI/Predictive Analytics space is huge (and exciting)!
I have been playing around with various in-memory applications (Tableau, Spotfire, etc.) and will have to download the Office 2010 beta to test drive PowerPivot.
BTW – I am on the West Side of Cleveland and am a sports freek myself, unfortunately my Browns are causing me great frustration!
Jason
@jasprice
Hi Jason
Yeah, the Browns… hmmm… fortunately for me I guess, I don’t really have much of a tradition of adopting the sports teams from the cities I move to
I was raised as a Gator fan and that really is the only team I remain somewhat devoted to. Mostly I just like to see good games.
Oh, and as a child, I loved the Denver Broncos because they had the same colors as Florida. I remember vividly The Drive and The Fumble. I hope we can still be friends
If I organized some sort of 1-day PowerPivot event after the first of the year somewhere around here, would you be interested?
-rob
Great work Rob …. I think you are jumping in on something exciting here – noy to worry…
I hope to be able to help with that success too.
Regards
Dick
[...] of you may recall that I moved from Redmond to Cleveland last summer for family reasons, after thirteen years of building software in Redmond. My [...]