"One day it just hit me -- I should quit. There were no big reasons, only a lot of little ones. I had just launched v1 of the client and server side of Spot, and while it contained sophisticated technologies, I didn't really believe it would take off in the marketplace. I had gained lots of knowledge yet only understood the Microsoft world. I had made some good money, but I had no time to enjoy it. Though my boss was happy with me, I was losing motivation to just keep doing the same thing I had been doing for over a decade. I looked around the company and saw a lot of ancient codebases and unprofitable ventures.
"My mom didn't approve of my quitting before finding my next job, but I knew I could only properly figure out what was next after I left.
"Little did I know what was in store for me.
"A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."
