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There’s is a connection between end-of-the-week meetings, Ego and Dr. Oz (what a collection)

Sometimes I dread the last meeting of the work week, the one that comes between you and the mad dash home to kick off the weekend.  But sometimes, the meeting is worth the investment.

That last meeting of the week, the one you accept as your calendar has been full all week with meetings, reviews, PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook email and more email… I must admit that I often block the last part of my day on the last work day of the week just to get through the balance of the mail I receive.  Sometimes meetings are scheduled and there’s no chance to decline, and on top of that, you may not relish the topic… more so when it has to do with legal, finance, corporate strategy, compliance… or all the above on those rare “perfect storm” occasions. 

But yesterday’s last-meeting-of-the-week was an exception, and the discussion on topics that of real importance was worth going overtime.  (When you have school age children, my advice to be mindful of how and when you do this… a school night is not a good time to do this when you’ve kids to get off to bed.)

A follow up to our positive discussion was a note on willingness to help, partner, and ego… and the need to keep ego in check.  (My thought is that ego runs deep at many levels, and it inspires me to see that we have people in senior leadership who keep theirs in check.)  I was reminded that the book…

“… “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle… talks about being ego-less (and several other good things)…  I am on chapter 6 and I like it a lot.  You may find it interesting in case you get a chance to read.”

Thanks for the recommendation.

I do, on occasion, get a spare moment here and there to read, having just finished “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick M. Lencioni – a good read (thanks, Carol).  I’ve read Death by Meeting and The Five Temptations of a CEO, and the Five Dysfunctions is not to be missed.  What is it about the number five that has Lencioni so enthralled? 😉

As for ego, the link was appreciated.  I’m not one to lean towards the ideals that Eckhart Tolle traditionally writes, but I found excerpts of a couple of “New Earth” classes run thus far on Oprah.com were time well spent.  (Yes, there are some men in this world that watch Oprah, as you can see for yourself here, as Dr. Oz Takes Over The Oprah Winfrey Show.)  I’ve not made the time or had the inclination to participate live in the online classes, but the recordings are available here available here on Oprah.com.

Not available in Windows Media Format, but the QuickTime files are viewable on PCs and Macs with Apple’s player.  And contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to install Safari as many have noted in the blogoshpere recently (but you do have to click ‘no’ quite often… 😉  including this post by Martin LaMonica…

“A lot of people appear to be bent out of shape about Apple using its auto-update service to distribute the Safari Web browser on Windows. The CEO of Mozilla, which makes the rival Firefox browser, calls it bad business.

“In a blog on Friday, Mozilla CEO John Lilly criticized Apple’s practice, uncovered this week, of offering iTunes and QuickTime users Safari 3.1 on Windows through the Apple Software Update pop-up. “

(Whatever your media and browser preference, enjoy the QuickTime file downloads of the videos.)

So next time you’re considering declining that 4:00PM Friday meeting, think again.  As quoted in Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

One additional note: although Lencioni’s Amazon blog doesn’t have a recent, there is this excerpt from a post made over the Christmas holidays last year…

“Now, any one of these things [that you’d like to give your employees… that will outlast any cookie basket or gift certificate or desk accessory you can order on-line] would make a nice management gift, but together they become the most important quality any person yearns for in their jobs: fulfillment. Without them, employees cannot help but become miserable.

“By beginning the process—and it is certainly a process—of removing anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurement from the work lives of your employees, you will be giving your people a gift that will last far beyond this wonderful season, and that will impact their families and friends in profound, life-changing ways.”

Download the A New Earth Web Classes

Tags: Oprah, New Earth, whack, How to, ego, misc, articles, what I read.

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Windows XP Home for ULCPCs available until 2010

I read the news today, oh boy…


In case you missed it, Microsoft announced that the availability of Windows XP Home will be extended worldwide in support of “an emerging, new class of mobile personal computers commonly known as ultra-low-cost PCs, or ULCPCs.”



This will Windows XP Home for ULCPCs will be available until the later of June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows.


 Tags: Microsoft, Windows XP, ULCPC, Windows.

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Microsoft vs. Apple: Who patches zero-day vulnerabilities faster? The Swiss chime in with an answer

So, the controversy is nothing new, and nearly as old as the as Apple 1984 commercial.  I’ve posted previously at Mac and PC Security and noted that — no matter what connected platform you use — there’s no immunity from security vulnerabilities.  And there is certainly no shortage of news on Macintosh vs. Windows vulnerabilities.

This week it appears that the efforts to improve security over the last few years had paid a dividend: Computerworld notes the Swiss research that examines which company patches zero-day vulnerabilities faster.  And the answer isn’t likely to show up in an Apple ad any time soon…

Apple’s teasing commercials that imply its software is safer than Microsoft’s may not quite match the facts, according to new research revealed at the Black Hat conference on Thursday.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology looked at how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the 0day (zero-day) patch rate.

They analyzed 658 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple. They looked at only high- and medium-risk bugs, according to the classification used by the National Vulnerability Database, said Stefan Frei, one of the researchers involved in the study. [Click here for the paper in PDF format.]

What they found is that, contrary to popular belief that Apple makes more secure products, Apple lags behind in patching.

Frei is with the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. The paper is “0-Day Patch – Exposing Vendors (In)security Performance, 2008” in which the researchers look at the “0-day patch rate as a new metric to measure and compare the performance of the vulnerability handling and patch development processes of major software vendors.”

I hear the Swiss are traditionally neutral. 😉

More at http://www.techzoom.net/risk/ and the Computerworld article at Microsoft vs. Apple: Who patches zero-days faster?

Tags: Microsoft, security, Macintosh, Stefan Frei, 0 Day, vulnerability.

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Connecting with Customers via Windows Error Reporting (Watson) and CEIP

Earlier this week, I provided a couple of glimpses at how product groups listen and respond to customers and partners.  In the seven plus years I’ve been at Microsoft, I’ve seen lots of different ways how product teams listen and respond to customers.  Previously, I worked along side the Engineering Excellence group, working on CPE across the product groups; now, I’m back in the Windows group… but I still work across product groups as they concentrate on improving customer satisfaction.

And core to the effort in most teams is the product and machine telemetry we get from millions and millions of customers through Microsoft Windows Error Reporting, the Customer Experience Improvement Program and software quality metrics (aka SQM, or ‘squim’).  For more on SQM, see this prior post.

Windows Error Reporting dialogWindows Error Reporting (WER) is based on the technology that was originally known as Dr. Watson, the Windows program error debugger tool included in previous versions of Windows, as far back as Windows 3.0, and was included in Windows 98, Me, and XP.(Check out Raymond’s blog to understand why Windows Error Reporting is nicknamed “Dr. Watson”.) 

WER captures software crash and hang data from end-users who agree to report it. You can access the data that is related to your applications online at https://winqual.microsoft.com.  Gregg offers an overview on his blog on developers can use WER to debug what went wrong.  In Windows, WER feedback technology is part of Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 operating systems.

We know that the effort makes an impact: as outlined in the above article, our analysis shows that across all the issues that exist on the affected Windows platforms and the number of incidents received:

  • Fixing 20 percent of the top-reported bugs can solve 80 percent of customer issues.
  • Addressing 1 percent of the bugs would address 50 percent of the customer issues.

Considering the hundreds of millions of customers around the world, that’s a considerable impact. 

Steve Ballmer outlined the effort in his 2002 letter on “Connecting to customers,” when he discussed how Microsoft can do a better job of serving our customers, and ultimately improve the customer experience through better communications and connections…

“The process of finding and fixing software problems has been hindered by a lack of reliable data on the precise nature of the problems customers encounter in the real world. Freeze-ups and crashes can be incredibly irritating, but rarely do customers contact technical support about them; instead, they close the program. Even when customers do call support and we resolve a problem, we often do not glean enough detail to trace its cause or prevent it from recurring.

“To give us better feedback, a small team in our Office group built a system that helps us gather real-world data about the causes of customers’ problems–in particular, about crashes. This system is now built into Office, Windows, and most of our other major products, including our forthcoming Windows .NET Servers. It enables customers to send us an error report, if they choose, whenever anything goes wrong.”

With WER, product groups get information that helps them identify the most common issues that our customers encounter on their computers, along with details that can help the teams debug the problem.  If you’ve every run into a problem or application crash on your computer, chances are that you’ve seen the prompt to provide more information to Microsoft on the failure.

We also provide WER for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Hardware Vendors (IHVs) on the MSDN forums, helping them find and correct issues with their application, ultimately leading to improvements in their products.  These companies access our error reports database and discussion forums to address the errors and incompatibilities that creep up in their equipment drivers, software utilities and applications. (As noted on our sites, WER data is available to ISVs, IHVs and OEM and ODMs.)

Bill Gates said at PDC 2003…

“We allow anyone who has an application that runs on Windows to sign up and get the reports that relate to their application, and we’ve got winqual.microsoft.com where people can do that.

“Today we’ve seen a lot of that activity from the driver manufacturers, but we want to see even more at the application level so it gets us working together on anything where a user is not having a great experience.”

Coupled with the telemetry from WER is the feedback we get through the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).  Through these programs, hundreds of millions of customers help Microsoft improve upon the design, quality and features of our products and services. Participation in the CEIP is anonymous: when you sign up for the CEIP, information about how you use certain products is automatically sent to Microsoft, collected in the aggregate with CEIP data from other computers.  Microsoft doesn’t use your collected CEIP data for any product marketing or promotions. (More details are provided in the Customer Experience Improvement Program Privacy Policy.) 

According to the CEIP site…

CEIP collects information about how you use Microsoft programs and about some of the problems you encounter. Microsoft uses this information to improve the products and features you use most often and to help solve problems. Participation in the program is strictly voluntary, and the end results are software improvements to better meet your needs.

The Windows Server team uses the CEIP for their products, include Windows Server 2008.  The team uses CEIP to improve the product in the following ways:

  • Helps to discover and fix software bugs in the operating system more quickly.
  • Helps to prioritize future Windows Server products and interim releases.
  • Helps to understand our customer system configurations more clearly, allowing Windows Server product teams to more accurately reproduce customer environments in their labs.
  • Helps to determine industry trends in computer hardware.

As John Song notes on the Dynamics CRM team blog, the team gathers information on how our customers are using the customization tool and how much they are customizing the out-of-the-box CRM. 

CEIP“Through SQM/CEIP data, now we know that the Account is the most updated form in the CRM 3.0 (Well, that wasn’t a surprise for us, but the number of changes made was). A quarter of the CRM customers are adding good amount of new fields in the Account and other “main” forms.

It’s all about providing feedback to the products teams. 

Mauro Meanti on the WSYP Project[Update: you can see the WSYP video here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/D28FkfJiauk]

When I’m asked about how this data is used, I often point people to my post “TwC’s site on Product Reliability… and WSYP” that has has a link to the WSYP Project, looking at how we leverage customer feedback in near real-time to improve software quality. (You can find this and other clips on the TechNet UK Spotlight page.)

And yes, Mauro is a real Microsoft employee. ; )

You can take advantage of WER to investigate the most frequently reported software crashes, resolve the problems, and inform your customers of the fixes, establishing a strong feedback loop with your customers. 

 

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Also available via http://bit.ly/AxnhyW 

Link: How Windows Error Reporting Helps Customers

Tags: Microsoft, Watson, customer feedback, WER, Windows Error Reporting, SQM, CEIP, Video.

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Daylight Saving Time ends soon across Australia… and they have their own mascot for the change

It’s fitting: Japan has Doraemon for anime and Microsoft Oz has a whimsical cartoon character to help citizens prepare for the upcoming end to daylight saving time in Australia. 

 

Another example of listening and responding to customers…

imageNo sooner had the Japanese selected Doraemon as the official anime ambassador that the folks at Microsoft in Oz brought out a cartoon character to help usher customers through the system updates for daylight saving time changes in Australia.  Visit the Microsoft Australian home page for daylight saving time for more information…

This year New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and South Australia are extending Daylight Saving. Daylight Saving will end 1 week later, on Sunday 6th April and recommence 3 weeks earlier on Sunday 5th October.

Your Microsoft Windows PCs, servers and mobile devices will need to be updated so that they automatically adjust their internal clocks on the new Daylight Saving start and end dates. You may also need to adjust some appointments in your Microsoft Office Outlook calendar.

But does this new character have a name?  My money’s on “Iain the IT Pro”. 😉

This site was launched in response to the customer requests in Australia to help make sense of the changes last year to daylight saving time that affect customers around the world.  At corporate, we launched a DST and Time Zone informational website (http://www.microsoft.com/time in case the hyperlink fails) providing links to key documents and articles on updates and changes for Microsoft products.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST, Time Zones, Australia.