Editor's Note, Sept. 25, 2009 - Mark Hamburg left Microsoft in September of 2009.

Mark Hamburg was a Distinguished Engineer in the Platform Technology and Strategy Group with more than 20 years of experience building major desktop applications. He reported to David Vaskevitch and focused on OS user experience and related frameworks and programming models.

Hamburg joined Microsoft in May of 2008. He was previously a Fellow at Adobe Systems Incorporated where he led Adobe Photoshop design and development for eleven years before spending six years instigating and leading the project that became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. He has a long history as a technical innovator – he holds 29 patents and was named Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association’s Inventor of the Year in 1999. His focus, however, has always been on user experience with technical investigations being driven by observing what users were trying to achieve and looking for better and frequently surprising ways to help them achieve those goals. At Microsoft, Hamburg set aside his imaging and photography background and stepped back a level to focus on building a better platform for application developers so that they in turn can deliver better experiences to end users.

Prior to joining Adobe in 1990, Hamburg cut his teeth in the desktop software market working first at Ann Arbor Softworks and then at Ashton*Tate on FullWrite Professional, a word-processor for the Macintosh remembered for its ground breaking feature set and user interface.

Hamburg holds an MS in mathematics from the University of Michigan. Hamburg lives with his wife, children, and cat in Woodinville. He has been a regular performer on electric guitar at the annual Santa Cruz International Live Looping festival and has photographed the last several festivals.