Tag: Microsoft culture

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Mary Jo Foley: Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft

Last week, ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley posted on her blog the Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft.


“When it comes to building community — and profiting from it — Microsoft’s Xbox team is helping write the playbook. That fact isn’t lost on the rest of the company. Increasingly, other divisions at Microsoft are studying what the Xbox folks are doing right and trying to apply those lessons to their own products and services.”


She’s right, IMHO.


Mary Jo spoke with JJ Richards, the GM of Xbox Live, to collect his thoughts on what other parts of the company could learn from the Xbox. Here they are…



1. Tiers need to be clear and simple. In Xbox Live, there is gold and there is silver. Fewer, simpler SKUs are better.


2. The dashboard is the UI. Users want access to lots of data, all in one place. They don’t want to have to hunt for it.


3. An online marketplace sells content. The Windows and Office Live teams already grok this one. Making Microsoft and third-party wares available as a one-stop shop helps move more add-on hardware, software and services.


4. Arcade: Not everyone is a shooter-game pro. Users come with different skill sets and interests. Some prefer “Geometry Wars” to “Gears of War.” Microsoft’s Developer Division gets this, and is launching Express versions of its tools for hobbyists/nonprofessional programmers.


5. Achievements are a way to stay in touch. The more ways you can encourage community members to stay in touch, the better.


6. Ubiquitous voice and text are de rigeur. In the Web 2.0 world, everyone’s a multi-tasker. All services and apps should bake-in messaging, mail and other unified-communications technologies.


7. Roaming accounts are key. Users want their audio and video content, contact lists, address books, favorites and other settings available on any device, anywhere at any time.


8. Build communities within your community. Gamerzones in the Xbox world allow similar types of users to more easily connect. What’s the business equivalent of Xbox Live’s “Underground”? Good question.


9. Points are the new online currency. Office Online already is moving in this direction, and other Microsoft Live services will likely do the same.


10. Gamerscore = reputation. Other divisions at Microsoft have been wrestling with how to rank community participants by “reputation” to help users gauge which content/commentary to trust. Gamerscore could become the model here.


“Richards acknowledged that the Xbox Live team can learn a thing or two from other Microsoft divisions, as well, such as how to handle child safety settings in world with more and more user-generated content. But it seems to me that it’s Microsoft’s non-gaming businesses that have more to learn from the Xbox team — at least when it comes to building community — than the other way around.”


I’ll add number 11: Connect with your customers. Customers want to be heard and sometimes appreciate that they have influenced product design and delivery with their feedback. More and more, teams have formalized how they get direct responses from customers, whether it’s internally through a dogfood deployment, more formally through a Connect-managed beta or customer focus groups to see how people react to and how they use a new product or service. Some of the teams that have the best understanding of their customer’s needs are connecting directly in 1:1 and 1:many discussions, whether it’s on Xbox Live in head-to-head matches and play, or on blogs like the Xbox team’s Gamerscore blog, the Xbox team blog on MSDN and of course Major Nelson.

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It’s all about the customer: we have plenty of room to improve

This week I am blogging from the lovely pacific northwest, from our meeting off-campus with our teams from around the world focused on customer and partner satisfaction. I partner with Toby Richards from our Sales & Marketing Services Group on how we listen and respond to out customers and focus on improving our satisfaction across the board. Internally, we call this the Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) effort, and I focus on supporting the efforts in our three product divisions, across all of our product lines.


On the topic, Eric Lai from Computerworld has an article this week that takes a look at our effort to dedicated to improving customer satisfaction.



“According to its surveys, that strategy has borne fruit, says the company.


“We have plenty of room to improve, but overall satisfaction is at their highest levels ever,” said Toby Richards, general manager for worldwide customer experience at Microsoft in an interview Monday.


“For instance, Richards says that Microsoft’s decision to repeatedly delay the release of Windows Vista in order to tighten up its security and features was heavily influenced by survey results that showed customers asking for greater “product stability and reliability,” Richards said.”


As noted, we created the CPE effort to be a nimble, cross-group team, lead by exec partners Kathleen Hogan (worldwide customer support and services), and my boss, Jon DeVaan, who leads the Core Operating System Division in Windows. We work to continuously improve and drive improving the experience for our customers and partners every day, and on the things we do that impact our customes and partners.


But it’s a continuous journey, as I’ve heard our senior execs say.


We are dedicated to improving our “listen and respond” systems, our product quality and overall security & privacy (which are closely intertwined), as well as how we handle and reacts to issues such as the changes to daylight saving time.


Tags: Microsoft, loyalty, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service.


Also available via http://bit.ly/8fcF3

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J Allard’s bio page is temporarily unavailable

One never knows what one will finds on our exec home pages…



J Allard’s bio page is temporarily unavailable. It will return later this week


Updated: May 7, 2007










Allard: N'Gai had it right.
Allard: N’Gai had it right.


“Would he really ditch the dreads?”


That’s what I was wondering after an E3 dinner with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal in 2005, knowing that it would be about a year before I knew the answer. And what do you know, N’Gai called it.


Six weeks prior to our dinner together, Sony had launched their new PSP product in North America. It was a lightning rod for discussion at the annual game convention in Los Angeles. Not a lot of data, but no shortage of opinions and questions surrounded Sony’s new product:


Would the UMD disc prove to become “universal”? Would they be able to manage production costs and get the price down? Would people really use it for movies and music as it had been promised? What would Nintendo’s response be? How would the industrial design and screen appearance age with use? Was there a chance that it would become the self-proclaimed “Walkman of the 21-st century?” What would the “killer app” be for the system?


Before I had ever met N’Gai, I knew exactly who he was. He had co-penned the cover article for Newsweek magazine in 2000 called “The Amazing PlayStation 2” which I have kept in my office ever since. It had hit newsstands only two weeks after we had approved a project codenamed “Xbox.” The article gushed about the possibilities of Sony’s new system that we had decided to compete with (Xbox would launch about 19 months later). In the end, while a number of promises in the article went unmet, the PS2’s market success would become incredible – it was and continues to be a huge success, selling over 100 million systems worldwide.


As the dinner discussion turned to the new Sony system, it was clear that N’Gai was still a PSP enthusiast. I was far less bullish on the PSP’s market acceptance… I didn’t understand their UMD movie push or why the studios would follow. I questioned their decision to use optical media because of the impact on battery and production costs. I was skeptical of the size of the product as a music player. As always, it was a fun debate as we pushed back and forth on the issues.


At one point N’Gai declared, “the PSP is so good, it will sell faster than PS2” and with that, the gauntlet had been thrown down.


Admittedly, the PSP was a beautiful device with incredible specs… it had a fantastic screen and I knew that they’d sell millions of them, but I just didn’t think that demand could be higher than for the PS2. A challenge was established. If he was right, I’d appear onstage during my E3 keynote sporting dreadlocks (his hairstyle). If he was wrong, he’d clone my hairstyle by letting me shave his dreads at the same conference. We set the 10-million-unit mark as the deciding point.


Well, N’Gai called it. In October 2005, Sony announced that they had surpassed 10 million units sold after only 10 months of commercial availability. He had me beat.


The thing is, he never got to cash in on the wager. In 2006, I had shifted my focus to a new project called Zune, didn’t present at E3 the annual games conference and I had forgotten about the challenge. He reminded me a couple weeks back that I never made good on the bet so here are the promised dreads – 360 days after the last E3 Xbox press conference.


Hats off to Sony for outpacing the PS2 velocity with their PSP. Dreads on for N’Gai for calling it back in 2005. Figured it was only right to include both the dreads and PSP in the photo.


P.S.: For the record, I’d never have been able to cut off your dreads, my friend. I might’ve clipped one off for show, but could never have butchered your style like that.

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CNET interview with Ray Ozzie and his “quiet revolution at Microsoft”

No sooner do I talk about how Ray Ozzie is connecting with customers that I see this on CNET News today, discussing SilverLight at Mix and “about the company’s ongoing transition from the age of desktop software to a new era.”


Ozzie’s quiet revolution at Microsoft
Chief software architect Ray Ozzie says nearly everything Microsoft does will include an online services component.



There is this impression that Microsoft is protecting its turf when it comes to Web-based Office-style applications. You see Google doing it and start-ups like Zoho–and there are online ERP applications–and Microsoft hasn’t done that yet. But Microsoft could do it, so why don’t you?


Ozzie: People as far back as Desktop.com have done it. Well, I don’t know how to say it other than to say that we’re running a fairly significant business. Protecting implies setting up barriers–there are no barriers. These people are free to go take whatever solutions they want to put them in a browser. We believe–and I believe this deeply, I’ve been a desktop business for a while–that the deployment environment of using desktop tools on a PC is a really valuable one. Sometimes, just because you can doesn’t mean that you necessarily should. To the extent that there are scenarios that involve the Web that are very useful, we are going to go after those scenarios because it helps our customers–we got to stay focused on those customers.


We’re not going to be in a reactionary mode that just because somebody proves that something can be done, and it has some trade-offs, then we just immediately have to follow suit. I think that there are a lot of lessons they learned right now with those competitors of things that they’ve done that people just aren’t using, and things that they’ve done where people are actually using it in ways that they aren’t using desktop apps today. So I think that we are all learning from this and our product will end up in some hybrid form.

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Your questions: “What’s the corporate culture like at Microsoft?”

Stephen asks a few questions (including what I do at Microsoft)…



“What are your personal opinions on the corporate culture at Microsoft? What about the work environment: are you pleased with and what do you think could be improved? I read in an interview with fellow Microsoft employee, Chris Pratley, that the attitude at work is very results-oriented. Is there validity to this claim?”


(BTW, a disclaimer: I enjoy Chris Pratley’s blog.)


There’s a lot to be said about the corporate culture at Microsoft. IMO, the culture is in transition, noting that with more than 70,000 employees you’re going to have some bureaucracy: a challenge is to keep the culture from becoming too bureaucratic. So far, I have seen a good balance as the management at our company makes a concerted effort to help people focus on their jobs without their enthusiasm and energy being curbed by a thousand and one processes and reports. Not to say there aren’t improvements to be made. 😉


What I like: the diverse culture offers a great mix of ideas, perspectives and people. Yes, like all large companies we have levels of management hierarchy and organization, but senior management is accessible and solicits feedback and opinion: one such example is how Lisa Brummel listens to employees and takes in feedback on everything from employee compensation and reviews to towels in the locker rooms. 


I agree that the attitude at work is very results-oriented. Through our annual Commitment-setting process, we set annual goals that are tracked and measures; we’re in the first year of using the new on-line Commitment tool (which is certainly 1.0, but a step in the right direction) that allows employees to publish their goals for the year and track progress against the goals. That makes each individual and group’s work and targets more transparent. And certainly there is a competitive undercurrent, a result of having many Type A personalities at the company. 😉


Many employees are vocal and have been instrumental in moving the company culture forward: it’s not something you can implement as a policy and expect it to take hold. IMHO, employees at every level can have a direct hand in changing and shaping our corporate culture.