Ben Slivka led the Internet Explorer team when I was at Microsoft, and he helped make it one of the most intense and exciting projects I’ve worked on. 

These days he’s heavily involved in education, both through the Wissner-Slivka Foundation and by co-founding a new startup called Schoolsoft.   They are currently hiring a VP of engineering; this is a unique opportunity to do important and rewarding work and to define the engineering culture of a new startup. 

Below are a few snippets from the Schoolsoft VP of Engineering job description:

The successful candidate will establish, elaborate, and evolve our Culture of Engineering as he builds and leads his team in the design, development, and deployment of our web service.

The successful candidate will work effectively to leverage the passion, experience, and vision of the company while balancing the day-to-day and strategic business priorities.

 Until the engineering team grows larger, a successful candidate will also design systems, write specifications and code, perform code reviews, debug and fix nasty bugs, and perform all of the other skills of a world-class software design engineer.

The successful candidate will describe his job thusly: “My role is to set the high level goals, get the right people in the right jobs — where they can leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses — while I coach.  I try to push down authority with responsibility as deeply into the organization as possible.  I also represent the customer to make sure we meet our goals.”

Read More if you’re interested in this position.

In the past, I might have used Google to find pages on the web, folder browsing and liberal cursing to find documents on my own computer, and the start menu or the command line to launch applications.

With desktop search, there is now a convergence of all three activities into a single search based interface.

Let’s review the current state of the art:

Google Desktop Search provides a single, speedy interface for finding any kind of content, either web pages or documents on my own computer. It also includes local applications in desktop search results.

MSN Desktop Search does the same, and also provides the ability to define easy-to-type shortcuts for launching applications or invoking web based search forms, as described by David Brunelle in MSN Desktop Search Hacks.

As a geek power user, search shortcuts are great: I can hit a single shortcut key regardless of what I’m doing, bring up a search box, and launch my key applications using concise shortcuts I’ve defined. It does hint at a day when lines between search, GUIs, and command lines are blurred.

It will be interesting to see to what extent these ideas will be incorporated into other desktop search applications, and to what extent such an interface because a mainstream way of launching applications. The lines will continue to get blurrier between content and applications, and between local versus web based applications. As this happens, the start menu or dock becomes less and less appropriate as a way of navigating to applications.