Category: Uncategorized

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.

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).