M3 Sweatt

I received a link (thanks, Jonathan) to this post titled “Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide” on the Creating Passionate Users blog. I’m not sure that I characterize these customer-focused focus points as subversive. (BTW, a good “top eight list” can be found on Peter Davidson’s be connected blog.) I do like the top five (IMHO) out of the blog…

• Frame everything in terms of the user’s experience.
  
• Speak for real users… not fake abstract “profiles.” (I’ll include “Put pictures of real users on your walls” under this one)
  
• Get your hands on a video camera, and record some users. (I’ll put this under “Know your customer”)
  
• Challenge user-unfriendly assumptions every day.
  
• Don’t give up.

These are all great. But there’s one point in particular I don’t agree with in the blog: “Be afraid of Six Sigma. Be very afraid.” That’s like saying “be afraid of power steering,” something that you know has its place in certain everyday experiences, but you may not understand exactly how it works. (Note: I have a conceptual knowledge of it, thanks to how stuff works.) 

There are aspects of continuous improvement, striving for quality and better processes that can help the organization in different parts of the company’s operations. For examples, look at how our own Ops & Tech Group use the Microsoft Office System Accelerator for Six Sigma, and John Porcaro’s note and overview on Six Sigma in Sales & Marketing.

There have been some questions around process improvements at Microsoft and the impact to various teams, so let me put this rumour to rest: a squadron of black belts did not parachute in to Redmond, take the dev teams hostage and force them to read “Six Sigma for Dummies” while listening to Jeffrey Immelt sing his greatest hits.

Now, we do have a number of examples where we’re seeing process and systems improvements that impact our products are everywhere through the company, notably in security and privacy. I was reminded of this in the ride back from the Company Meeting as I sat next to Glenn Fourie, our International Privacy Strategist. From a process stance, we’ve built the Security Development Lifecycle (aka “SDL”), the development process we’re using across the company and in the product groups. It helps us ship software to our customers and partners that has been created by devs trained in the art of the SDL, spec’ed and tested to be more resilient and secure.

Steve Lipner (you can see him mug for the camera at the Secure Software Forum) and Michael Howard in the SBU documented the lifecycle, which also includes our introspective look at products in something called the Final Security Review (affectionately know internally as the FSR). In order to get approval for release, software products must go through a detailed review. In the FSR, we look at whether or not the product is ready to release to our customers and partners before we get to the release. In his blog, Soma covered the various phases of the SDL in VS2005. The FSR not only looks to see whether the code is ready for release, it also helps us determine the origin of any issues through RCA and (if needed) prevent them from happening again in the future (through our engineering and security training curriculums, dev/ test/ spec or other process improvements). 

As originally approved last year (Feb 2004) when the DVD Forum endorsed it, tonite Bloomberg carries a press release in Japan that Microsoft and Intel will back the HD-DVD format. (Full press release is also available here on MSN Money Central). See also the discussion and announcements of the content to be available later this year. As reported this summer, the Xbox 360 may eventually support HD-DVD at some point.

Whenever the Auxiliary Display on an Asus laptop makes an entrance, there’s a buzz. I especially love it when people look at this feature as part of a series of fleeting features in a Windows Vista in a dimly lit room, and among is a gaggle of other cool devices… and they remember aux display.

“That was so cool!” was one reaction I heard recently. “I want that now.”

“You’ll have to buy a new laptop to get it. Is it worth it?” I asked the person next to me while standing in a line for something to warm me up.

“Oh yeah… I’ll buy a new laptop when (Windows) Vista comes out. That (auxiliary) display is icing on the cake, or at least the lid.” They then grabbed a frosty-cold one and headed off to see a few demos.

Slated for laptops in the Windows Vista era, aux display it is a very nice feature for taking a quick look at your calendar or firing up Windows Media Player to listen to audio (I’d personally prefer that to having to open the lid on a flight, as with the innovative HP DV1000-type laptops). Makes you wonder why this shouldn’t be a must-have feature on PCs as well, especially those with displays today as on my Windows Media Center PC. 

A note on real-world impact of aux display: I spend my day hopping all over campus and I run into the same situation in almost every meeting: someone waits for their laptop to awake from S3 standby in order to check their calendar (‘Though I’ve found that most people use S4 as the preferred standby state, putting their PCs into a deep sleep between meetings. Many people don’t even open their laptops in meeting for fear that people will think they’re working on email: no, really, I’m taking notes in OneNote.) If there are just 100 meetings a day across our entire company where this scenario plays out for one person in each one, you’re looking at not-so-little cumulative productivity hit of around 400 hours a year. Now, extrapolate that benefit across the laptop market: oodles and oodles of productivity gains, fewer GPRS minutes wasted in syncing your Smartphone, no more printed Outlook calendar pages…

And that’s just the calendar. Imagine being able to see the Outlook notification messages when new mail arrives.

More pre-release info on the aux display platform API is up on MSDN. Bill also mentioned it in his WinHEC keynote earlier this year. And one fun look at one guy who absolutely had to have aux display on his PC today.

Today in the Seattle Times’ Here & Now Traffic Watch:

Several thousand people are expected at Safeco Field today for a private, daylong business gathering. Pedestrian and vehicle traffic, including more than 200 charter buses, is likely to impact the stadium area from about 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

No kidding.

The lights. The sounds. The demos (many were high-level highlights from PDC). The chocolate bars. OK, scratch the last one. Robch has a good summary on his blog tonite, ‘though he did miss the remaining two items from his top five list (not to mention XBOX 360, TabletPC, Windows Starter Edition, the new suite of Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and of course Windows Media Center Edition… so it should probably be a top ten list).

So I’ll add these two for now to round out the top five as it’s bedtime for the kids (aka “the witching hour”):

4. The presenters: I was impressed by just about everyone, and how they noted the importance of our customers in almost every one of the sessions. When you look at the suite of products and services discussed this summer and our incredibly customer-tech-product focused execs, I’m happy to be here.

5. The crowd: Microsofties at their best, with super enthusiasm even in sub-arctic weather (think March of the Penguins). Kudos to those with the gumption to import noise makers and rock the house.

Word of the week: “Zany”  Considering the source I’ll use that in my general responses from now on.

Phrase for the rest of the year: “Heavens to Betsy.” Continuous Improvement is already in my vocabulary.

(Added 092405: If you’re interested in reading — and listening to — a joint interview with Bill and Steve just after the meeting, check out the article in today’s Seattle Times.)