#CAT NINJA 11 UPDATE#
And then this past week, to celebrate the Windows 10 Anniversary Update we just released (which, by the way, has some ninjacat emojis which were even mentioned in Teen Vogue a couple of months ago), we also posted some new wallpapers and an animated GIF: One of the people on the Xbox avatars team was a ninjacat fan, so I worked with him to make some avatar animations/props too ( T-rex and Shark). In particular what I loved seeing is how fans made it their own, creating their own mashups and designs, as the spirit of the ninjacat isn’t really specific to any particular image, it’s more about the general concept of holding the Microsoft flag and being proud of what we’re doing… and well, because it’s the internet, cats and memes are involved.Īs we got closer to the launch of Windows 10 last summer, we made some new designs and blogged about it, posting a “DIY kit” along with some wallpapers.¹ Around this timeframe the Skype team also approached me and asked if they could do an emoticon animation of one of the designs, which we had fun with.Īs the months went on and we got requests, we made more stickers and T-shirts to give out at various events, but we also started to joke about how it had gone far beyond the expected 15 minutes of fame and clearly the ninjacat was jumping the shark. It was “super cool” (in the Microsoft vernacular – we have a tendency to put “super” in front of adjectives) to see people enjoy this thing we did just for fun within our team.
Interest in the stickers with other Microsoft employees increased after that event, so I made some another print run, which continued for a couple of months until the folks at The Verge ended up seeing a sticker on an employee’s laptop and wrote the above article.Ĭustomers and fans then started to share this image representing not just Windows 10 but also Microsoft overall.
Then, in January 2015, we unveiled more of win10. As the months went by, Microsoft employees were putting the stickers on their laptops and it just kind of spread slowly from there. Over the next six or so months, I handed out stickers to coworkers, who then asked for more stickers to give to other coworkers, and so on. I did a small run of some shirts as well as stickers, since they are far less expensive than shirts. Now of course folks in our industry do love our geeky shirts… but even then, let’s just say that asking for a slide to be made into a shirt is not a common occurrence, so this was a really nice signal that there was something ‘there there’, and that we had ended up with a visual that spoke to a sort of zeitgeist about how people felt about the product and where we were headed.
#CAT NINJA 11 FULL#
In mid 2014, a couple of us in that team were working on a presentation about what would later become known as Windows 10, and as a joke we made a slide that started with this image (that made the rounds of social media in 2013) and then animated it into a slide full of “kittens and puppies and rainbows and unicorns” with a design that was inspired by the amazing Welcome to the Internet image by Jason Heuser.Īfter the presentation was over I started to get email from people on the team asking how they could get that powerpoint slide on a T-shirt.
And then recently in a random email thread with Raymond, he offered to host this on the Old New Thing (which I’ve been reading for 12+ years) which felt like the perfect place for this peculiar topic as part of Microsoft lore, so here it is. But if you want to take a romp through history on this topic to get up to speed, this article from The Verge in March 2015 is probably the best place to start:Įver since that article, as people have found out I was behind the ninjacat at Microsoft, they’ve asked me to write up this story. If you haven’t heard about the Microsoft ninjacat before… then this blog probably isn’t very interesting to you. Today’s entry comes from guest blogger KC Lemson, who answers a question everybody has been wondering but been afraid to ask: Where did the ninjacat come from?
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