I am one of the many fortunate people that had the opportunity to work with Ashok. I was the CTO of the Norwegian company FAST that was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. I quickly connected with Ashok and we started to work together on future bets for Microsoft. There are people at work that become colleagues – and then there are a few that become friends. Ashok immediately became a friend for me. His humble appearance in spite of his extreme talent and intellect made it so easy for him to connect deeply with everyone.
In our joint work we established a Microsoft Quest. These Quests aimed at 10-year bets for the company. We focused on the move from graphical user interfaces to human interaction based interfaces and the key technology pillars to enable this transition. The Quest was called Do-As-I-Say and was by the top 300 in Microsoft rated as the best Quest. Now – 6 years later – the ideas driven by Ashok have become the foundation for the most prioritized bets at Microsoft. I later continued to work with Ashok on the Leibniz technology. I truly appreciated the friendship we established and his work on the hardest problems in computer science became an inspiration for my own work.
It has been such a privilege to know and work with Ashok. You are always welcome in Norway
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