From the “it’s just silly enough to include as a Friday afternoon posting” files, I saw this pop up on MSN today.
English as a Second Language
Our correspondent can get by in several languages, but that has been of little use in Torino.
Rule #1 when traveling overseas: never assume your language will be spoken widely and that you will understood wherever you go.
Enjoy your weekend and the opening of the Olympics tonite, should you tune in.
I received a mail asking me what I do for Microsoft in my “work with our product groups on their efforts to improve satisfaction with our customers and partners.” I work in the Engineering Excellence group at Microsoft, the group that provides training, resources and tools for use in the product development lifecycle, along with best practices to integrate customer feedback and improve the experiences our customers and partners have with Microsoft (both our company and our products and services). I work a lot on that last part, the cross-company effort to dramatically improve our customer and partner satisfaction and make the voice of the customer more “real” for people.
But believe me, it’s not just me: in the product groups there are thousands of people focused on improving the customer and partner experience, in many different roles: the engineering disciplines (development, test, program management, localization, user experience, content), in addition to the great people we have in sales and marketing, customer service & support, IT and Operations, Licensing… the list goes on. We’re getting more active on telling our customers and partners about how we’re improving product reliability (through tools like Watson), feedback and other efforts you can read about in Orlando Ayala’s talk and Kevin Johnson’s address to partners.
I’ll bring more of these to light on my blog so you can get a sense of the progress we’re making, but you certainly don’t need me to do all the heavy lifting: there are many PMs, devs, testers, GMs, execs and others who bring these out in the open every day, on our blogs, forums, Channel 9 and tech chats.
I wanted to bring all this up as the email I received referenced a new spaces blog by nextmsft: the sender asked me if this in addition to what they’d read in minimsft was really what it’s like today at the company. (IMHO, Mini makes you think and helps keep your ego in check so you don’t get too cocky ; )
I felt compelled to comment, as the company I work at today is very different from the Microsoft I encountered in the early and late 90’s in Silicon Valley. Since arriving at MS — and especially coming to Redmond in 2003 — I’ve seen a real sea change in the culture, one that is heavily influenced (I believe) by the large number of employees we have at the company now who have extensive work experience outside Microsoft, many of them bringing their own personal experiences as Microsoft customers and partners to their roles.
I have been so impressed over the last several years, working in and with product groups. The product groups do “listen and respond” to customers constantly: as I noted in my comment to the nextmsft blog, we have some great people in our management ranks with real product experience. (I could write volumes on some of these people.) For example, I’m always impressed to hear how Steven Sinofsky’s world-class team is able to digest and manage the flood of information we get from our customers and partners on our Office suite of products.
Internally, we’re focused on addressing just that problem: putting the right listen and respond systems into place, with both system feedback (Watson, SQM) and customer and partner feedback (from our surveys, tech support, blogs, Frontline, Ladybug and now Connect…), and working with the product groups to integrate it into their systems and processes. The good news is that it’s working: employees can check my internal blog for more details and examples, plus the links off our customer & partner experience pages.
There was a comment on the blog comments attributed to Steven Sinofsky (I’ve heard many variations on this theme, almost an “urban legend” of sorts) that when it comes to knowing what customers want, “we don’t need to ask them.” There is a small air of truth in that we don’t just have to ask: Microsoft employees across the company — product groups, sales teams, customer support specialists, testers, you name it — hear from customers through a huge host of mechanisms: customer feedback systems, surveys, blogs, interviews, one on ones, focus groups, exec briefings, newsgroup postings, emails… the list goes on: at Microsoft, the customer has a voice and people do listen and respond.
Does that mean that we’re perfect, that we respond to each and every comment in short order with 100% accuracy? Heck, no. But it’s getting better — much better than a few years ago and certainly better than when I was just a customer and a partner. More often than not, product groups are setting a high bar for involving customers in their product lifecycles, as I’ve seen recently in the Kahuna team and Windows OneCare. The positive comments I hear coming from product teams today are louder than they were five years ago, telling me of their good work responding to customer needs, and on occassion asking “where can I get more information from customers?” I’ll bring more of those stories to the blog, but I’m happy to see many of those stories are all over the place today.
I have to go check on my sleeping boys — school tomorrow and there’s a flu running through the class. But as I quickly wrote this entry, I thought back to what attracted me to Microsoft, and it’s pretty simple: it was the opportunity to work with some of the best people in the world doing what they do best, providing our customers and partners with high quality products that meet a high bar of excellence… and ultimately the customer’s needs.
It’s not always easy, but the journey is much of the reward, and I love a good challenge.
Tags: microsoft, minimsft, customer satisfaction, Microsoft culture.
Happy birthday this week: the famed Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law this week ten years ago on February 7, 1996.
To celebrate, take a look at the good coverage on the Senate Commerce Committee Hearing on Net Neutrality from Jeff Pulver’s coverage from Washington this week. I like Jeff’s commentaries and enjoyed the Pulver Report for several years.
Over the last ten years we’ve seen incredible growth: today there are more than 70 million Americans on broadband connections, a huge jump from the approximately 5 million six years ago in 2000. Last fall, Lisa DiCarlo (senior editor at Forbes.com) noted that the adoption rate of high-speed broadband Internet is now slowing here. The US is far behind Korea, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland and (gasp) even Canada, which unlike some of the smaller nations with great population density has some incredible distance challenges. DiCarlo wrote: “That the U.S. is a laggard in broadband penetration–the country ranks 12th globally–could have implications for America’s social and economic standing in the world.”
Often, people don’t have a have a difficult time justifying the move as that the cost for “slow” DSL (up to 768Kbps downstream for $15-20/month) is just about a wash: for about the cost of a second POTS phone line, consumers can move to broadband and leave behind the second line (or keep the second line free for the kids). Anyone else remember the installation of their expensive dual channel ISDN line? ; )
But I’d argue that in some cases adoption slows for many of the same reasons subscribers were slow to initially take on premium tiers of cable and satellite TV: 500 channels and nothing I’m interested in is on. In the case of the Internet, it’s millions of home pages and few are compelling or even necessitate a high-speed connection. Major portals like MSN and some traditional broadcasters and content owners are making efforts to provide more audio and video entertainment on-line, and how last mile broadband pipe managers like Comcast are enabling their own portals with more value-added content (aggregating news and entertainment video clips to start). Slow, but it’s happening.
Interesting data point: AsiaMedia reports that in Korea, the government is concerned about how to ensure that all their citizens have access to the Internet, with a goal of “every household to be equipped with universal access to the broadband Internet, irrespective of income, age or region. Every citizen will be able to enjoy a culturally enriched life as a result of high-quality digital content delivered by digital television and the Internet.”
The Korean government acknowledged that the move to get the population on to the Internet is a major priority, making it easier for the government to be more transparent and accessible, as well as supporting and enhancing quality of life. Of course, as the article points out, the Koreans have to balance that effort while being careful not to alienate “have-nots” or contribute to a cultural lethargy and an increasingly “inactive population that sits for hours in front of a computer screen.”
As Bill Gates said, we want to see broadband adoption grow faster than it is today. He noted that “the majority of people will be connecting through broadband and interacting with information through many devices: PCs at work and at home, portable PCs, Tablet PCs, and pocket devices such as the phone, evolving from simply a voice device to a data device.” Echoing his CES keynote, it’s especially important for broadband access to improve and increase, across adoption, downstream data rates with our cross-device approaches (through Live services). In short, if you want all of your data and information from the cloud to be available at any time, from any device, broadband has to really be fast and ubiquitous.
And increasingly wireless.
For another look at some of the governmental challenges, read the AEI-Brookings paper on state and federal policy, “Broadband Penetration: An Empirical Analysis,” by Scott Wallsten. In it, the author takes a critical look at governmental policies, some that may not help boost broadband penetration but may even slow it in the US.
Tags: broadband, high-speed, Telecom Act, Jeff Pulver
First, on MBS and Reviews… It’s review season at Microsoft and I spent the last two days with our MBS team, specifically the people dedicated to improving customer and partner satisfaction. (OK, a caveat here: really, just about everyone in the MBS/Dynamics business group is super involved — it’s hard to find a more dedicated group anywhere interested and passionate about providing the best product and business experience for our customers.)
More about that as I come up for air, and out from under two days worth of email… thankfully, I had my Windows Mobile Smartphone with me that allowed me to keep up on urgent mail and schedule changes. But in short, it was great to be around a group of the satisfaction leaders from Dynamics and hear about our relationships with our customers and partners. And when it comes to connecting with our customers, Dynamics really works hard, esp with their page on how to connect with Business Solutions, ranging from on-line support to a “call me back” request form.
Now, on to OneCare: If you’ve seen the news, you know that yesterday we announced more details around OneCare, the new Windows PC security service. The team outlined the annual cost ($49.95) and commercial availability (planned for release in early June). If you sign up for the beta test by the end of April ’06, the is $19.95. Ever since I have been able to back up to an external and off-PC drive (in addition to CD and DVD), my back-ups are happening when they should and my little OneCare icon in the lower right corner is green (or so I’m told, as I’m colour blind).
Check out the forums at http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsonecare/, And more details on OneCare and other Live services can be seen at http://ideas.live.com/.
Tags: microsoft, customer satisfaction, Onecare.
From the “it’s just wierd enough to include as a Friday afternoon posting” files, this was sent to me on IM…
Spacesuit floats off to become a satellite – Space News – MSNBC.com
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A worn-out spacesuit, stuffed with trash and radio gear, was pushed away from the international space station on Friday to become the world’s strangest-looking ham-radio satellite.
Complete with helmet and gloves, the spacesuit floated past the Russian section of the international space station, 220 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth, before rotating away feet first and beginning its orbit around the globe. The sight was an eerie echo of science-fiction nightmares dating back to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Do svidaniya … Goodbye, Mr. Smith,” Russian flight engineer Valery Tokarev said as he and U.S. commander Bill McArthur began a six-hour spacewalk to perform maintenance and photography tasks.