Road Trip Video #1: The Boss Reluctantly Hands Over the Keys to the Ford Flex

In case you didn’t see yesterday’s blog entries, we spent most of yesterday on a little road trip from Toronto to Montreal. We took nine hours making a journey that normally takes about five, but that’s because we made a number of stops along the way, demonstrating Bing to random passers-by and trying out the Sync technology in a Flex that was lent to us by Ford Canada.

Here are links to yesterday’s blog entries in case you missed them:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The Blogging Rig
• Part 3: The Big Apple
• Part 4: More Big Apple
• Part 5: Avril Lavigne’s Hometown and My Alma Mater

I did a lot of tweeting from the road as well – go check out what I wrote on my @AccordionGuy twitter page.

Upstream bandwidth wasn’t quite so hot on the road, so it wasn’t possible to post videos yesterday. So I’ll be posting yesterday’s video today.

The Hand-Off

Here’s our boss, John Oxley, Director of Audience Marketing, at Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga (just outside Toronto), handing the keys to the Ford Flex to Damir with much apprehension:

In the video, John says:

It’s Monday morning and our good friends at Ford Canada and Bing have sponsored my team to go out and highlight technology innovation changes and the impact they’ve had – with Ford Flex, location-based software and Bing – across the country.

I’m about to give this brand new Ford Flex to Joey deVilla and Damir Bersinic to go from here to TechDays in Montreal, to do Coffee and Codes, show it along the way to developers, IT pros and anyone who wants to come by and see how technology has changed.

I’m really excited about the possibilities [but] I’m a little hesitant about giving away the keys to a car…especially to Joey and Damir. But you’ve got to trust your team, and I trust the impact they can have.

You’ll tell me three or four days from now whether this was a good decision or whether it was a lesson that I learned.

Was letting us take a brand new car on a road trip a good idea or a bad one? Let us know in the comments, or email the boss-man directly at john.oxley@microsoft.com.

(Please tell him it was a good idea.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.