M3 Sweatt

Today my youngest son stayed home from school with the same thing his father has… coming off a really bad cold. I had a string of meetings and discussions, some of which I participated through Office Live Meeting. I used the regular dial-in conference lines for one discussion (that was a problem) but the rest were all Live Meeting, able to view and sync with the presentations accompanying the talks. 

Last week Steve Ballmer talked to the Seattle Times with a focus on traffic and education, and said “what’s a high-tech company doing saying roads are a big deal — roads, roads, roads — tell everybody to stay home and work from home. You build this interactive technology; you should be able to stay home.”

With LM today, I was able to stay home so I didn’t sneeze around my coworkers (you’re welcome) and was able to keep some of the human interaction. I couldn’t look into people’s eyes today but I was able to get accomplished more than if I’d been stuck with just a POTS connection.

Kudos to the Live Meeting team for a great product that — as a Microsoft product customer — satisfied me when I needed it most: it worked without a problem. (Many times employees are among our harshest critics.) If I could get easier access to my Sharepoint projects… sync’ing latest versions of docs in the cloud… with people away from the office today, that would have solved some of the other issues today. For all the talk recently about hosted versions of productivity software, I was happy today to have the applications on my PC desktop when my cable net connection went down.

A quick note on my friend John Canning (Media Center Evangelist extraordinaire), who left Redmond recently for the wilds of Southern California. (The first link is to part one of his Channel 9 interview on Media Center… here’s part two.) I had the pleasure of working with him in HED prior to his move to the eHome team in Windows Client (I followed a short time later to Client).

John has been traveling the world as a tireless customer advocate and promoter of the benefits of time-shifted television. This is a guy who at the mere sight of customers would drop all he was doing and kick off a Media Center demo with the remote in hand.

Now he’s making the most of his experience in producing online stories and venturing out with another company (nameless for this entry), working as a Field Producer and Product Manager. He said that he has planned trips to Switzerland and the Eiger… and I’m looking forward to his installments.

I’ve seen a couple entries which are noting Xbox 360 bundles are available for pre-order. In my hunting, I found that RitzCamera is taking orders for the Xbox 360 Platinum System, which is one of two bundle configurations – this is the one I ordered. A lower priced starter system is also available. (Please note, I receive no benefits for posting this link.)

The Xbox group is amazingly focused on what their customers want out of a gaming and entertainment system, just as many employees in the product groups at Microsoft. Let me go a step further and say that HED has great customer and partner awareness overall… the HRD folks make sexy and functional hardware, with the latest edition to our own home office being the new comfort curve keyboard (say that five times fast). I’ve been so impressed with how teams at Microsoft meet, listen and work closely with our customers and partners (which in the case of HED includes consumers, distributors, retailers and the spectrum of game makers… you name it), in addition to bringing the voice of the customer to work every day in their own experiences. Robbie Bach said this summer that “consumers do want choice, they do want variety, and our challenge and our job is to deliver that choice and variety while we deliver a great integrated experience.”

Xbox 360 is a great example of that integrated experience. Most appealing to me is the Xbox 360’s feature of being a Windows Media Center Extender (“MCE”), replacing my cobbled together Xbox in the family room today (which has the IR add-on and multiple remotes for DVD and MCE). We already have an MCE in the bedroom that we access content from our Media Center in the office, which works very well over the home network. I also like the idea of having the much larger HDD. My hope is that there will be some game thought in how the upcoming Media Center remote keyboard might work with Xbox 360 (in addition to my Media Center PC).

But what to do with the old Xboxes at home? I’ve seen some very creative ideas out there but I think that the remaining original Xbox will find its way to the playroom.

This week in Redmond on campus is the 2005 MVP Global Summit. (For those who don’t know, annual Global Summit for our MVPs is a chance for all levels of people across the Microsoft product and field groups to meet & greet, host and knoodle with the great group of key technical experts in the community from around the world.)  At these collaborative events, MVPs also have the chance to meet others involved in their areas of interest (from Windows Client-Shell to CRM to MSN Photos) and get up to date on the latest and greatest technology and product.

This year it was also a way for people in the product groups to once again connect with MVPs and get their feedback on a variety of things… so yesterday afternoon we (members of the product groups) also hosted an MVP booth dedicated to product group Connections in the expo area, but we were busy meeting with a number of tireless MVPs. There were people who had just flown in from the US south east, from Malaysia, Australia, Canada, Sweden, you name it… and they had more energy than my four-year-old. We had a number of people in Redmond arrange their schedules just to attend the mixing events. We had representatives from MBS (CRM), Windows Server & Tools and DPE to name a few. We started at 1pm and went well after closing of the sessions. We got a tour of a number of MVP-specific sites, the MVP blogs, great product feedback and helpful insight.

One of the best things about the MVP Summit (besides the coffee bar) was that the feedback we get from the community goes straight to the teams working on the products, with no filters. You ask for an opinion and you get it, unfettered with all the detail you might miss in an on-line post. (You know you’re in deep when you start swapping “my first computer” stories and your old Compuserve IDs with one another.) And the nice thing is that everyone piles on, provides more information and feedback as they hear other discussions going on around them that may get their attention. My thanks to Cindy and Tom from MBS, Ken from DPE and the other MS employees who hung around and answered questions all afternoon. My head was spinning, and I had a blast. I hope that MVPs get as much out of the week and are as jazzed as ever.

Link of the moment: Microsoft communities, where you can reach Microsoft employees, experts, and others to share a wealth of knowledge about Microsoft products and related technologies.