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Your questions: How can I contact Microsoft Customer Service?

In the mailbag this long holiday weekend morning…



“I have run in to a problem with my Microsoft software… How can I contact Microsoft Customer Service?”


First, if the problem or question is related to software or products you purchased through a Microsoft OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) as part of a bundle, then you should first contact that company. Microsoft OEMs include companies such as Acer, Dell, Compaq / Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba (among others). This includes questions you have on using the operating system that was pre-installed on your PC (XP or Vista) as well as any software or accessories that came in the bundle.


If the questions or support involve a Microsoft product that you purchased seperately (not part of a computer bundle), then I suggest that you visit http://support.microsoft.com/ for general information.


From the Microsoft Support site…



For information about replacement manuals, disks, drivers and service packs, product orders, policies related to copying software on additional computers, licensing, and product registration, Microsoft Customer Service is available Monday through Friday, from 6:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Pacific time. To contact Microsoft Customer Service, call (800) 426-9400.


To register your product and to find information about product registration issues, visit the following Microsoft Web site: https://register.microsoft.com


Other support options



  • Contact Microsoft – Phone Numbers, Support Options and Pricing, Online Help, and more.

  • Customer Service – For non-technical assistance with product purchases, subscriptions, online services, events, training courses, corporate sales, piracy issues, and more.

  • Newsgroups – Pose a question to other users. Discussion groups and Forums about specific Microsoft products, technologies, and services.

If one of these links don’t address your issue, please visit the Online Support Page to start an email support incident or call (866) 833-7088. In the States we offer varying levels of support: for example, for Windows XP Home SP2, you receive to no-charge support requests and
no charge installation support by phone. (Visit the page for contact numbers in regions outside the US.) 


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Bill and Steve (Jobs) together at D5: will we see an Apple TV Ad brought to life?

In case you missed the news, eWeek’s Joe Wilcox asked “What Would You Ask Bill and Steve?” referring to next week’s Wall Street Journal All Things Digital – D5 Conference May 29-31 in Southern California, “where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs together will answer questions on the same stage. Will it be showdown or hoedown?”


The two founders will be together on May 30; Microsoft’s own Steve (Ballmer, that is) will present at D5 in a seperate segment. See the official press release for more.


I noted that CBS President Les Moonves and director George Lucas will speak at the D5 conference, but where’s ABC’s Robert Iger? Or Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group? As I noted previously, Ms. Sweeney and one of the forces behind ABC’s move to provide free, ad-supported ABC shows via the Internet?


For more info, visit http://d.wsj.com and http://allthingsd.com.


And Fred Gibbons writes in his post “The Mythic Wars of Competition Between Bill and Steve” about IBM’s introduction of the personal computer in 1981, comparing these two founders to “the equivalent of “Star Wars,” with Bill as Darth Vader and Steve as “the Force,” but some people thought of Steve as the quirky Yoda.”


Funny, I’ve never thought of Steve as Yoda. Han Solo, maybe… but not Yoda.

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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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Your questions: “What is going on? aQuantive… sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”

I was asked this morning by a friend from down south at a not-so-small Internet services company: “What is going on up there [in Redmond]? Six billion for aQuantive? That is a bunch of money. It sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”


A new record-setting, massive Microsoft acquisition, the largest the company has done. And yes, it sounds more of the type of acquisition you’d see being made in 94025, 94306 or 94043 rather than 98052.


The Seatte Times has a couple of articles today that take a look at the aQuantive acquisition announced yesterday, including this one on “What Microsoft saw in aQuantive: tools, tech and top-tier ties” from reporter Kim Peterson.



“Still, the acquisition news left some wondering why, exactly, Microsoft would pay so much for an advertising company. What is aQuantive all about, anyway?


“The 10-year-old company has grown mainly by offering top-to-bottom services for advertisers. It helps them create advertising and branding campaigns. It serves, or electronically places, those ads on popular Web sites for maximum exposure. And it offers sophisticated tools for tracking when people clicked on those ads and what they did on the Web site that followed.


“If you went to a banking site, for example, aQuantive’s system would note that and could show you ads for that bank when you visited other Web pages. And it wouldn’t be the same ad each time, either. The system could show you a sequence of ads targeted to your interests.


“AQuantive also creates Web sites for companies. It built the Postopia.com gaming site for Kraft, for example, and a site about youth travel programs for Disney. It created a “Fanta-island” Web site to help the Fanta beverage company reach out to teenagers.”


From my friend: “I’m surprised that you [referring to Microsoft corporate, not me personally] didn’t buy 24/7 [Real Media] for their technology [ad management systems and analytics]…” which was WPP’s announced purchase this week, for roughly a tenth of the aQuantive deal.


Good question.


Given the number of online properties Microsoft has, across Microsoft.com (plus popular subsites like Office Online), Live, MSN, MDSN, TechNet and Xbox, there is an opportunity to leverage AQuantive’s experience in the complete cycle os ad services, from develpment to placement and ultimately the analytics to see how the ads fare in the marketplace.


Given Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick to augment their display advertising business, as well as Yahoo’s controlling purchase of Right Media, I wonder about the future of other online advertising technology company firms, including as ValueClick and Viewpoint.


See also Times’ reporter Benjamin Romano’s article “For $6 billion, Microsoft buys huge slice of online-ad pie” which includes this excerpt:



“Asked whether the acquisition is in part to prevent a competitor from getting aQuantive — one the last large independent digital-advertising houses — Johnson talked only of the opportunity.


“We looked at how rapidly this industry is consolidating and unfolding, and we felt like now was the time to put a stake in the ground that says we are going to take our advertising platform to the next level and we are committed to this industry for the future growth of our company,” Johnson said.”

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Gordon Bell and MyLifeBits in Levy’s article “This Is Your Life, Every Bit of It!”

This in a recent Newsweek magazine, Steven Levy’s article “This Is Your Life, Every Bit of It!” with a look at individuals (such as Gordon Bell) who are working on “capturing everything [they] see and hear… a Pandora’s box for the digital age.”



“Since 2001, Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old computing legend now at Microsoft Research, has been heading a project called “My Life Bits.” The idea is to accumulate a definitive record of one’s life, from images and sounds captured by a “SenseCam,” to phone calls, e-mail, Web searches and so on—and then to develop techniques to search those disparate media on demand. You won’t be surprised to hear that Google is also developing its own solutions to searching video and audio. And a start-up called Ustream (now in beta) lets anyone do Webcasts live—sort of Justin.tv lite.”


And, for reference, this on Bell’s MyLifeBits…



“He is putting all of his atom- and electron-based bits in his local Cyberspace. It is called by MyLifeBits the successor to the Cyber All project. This includes everything he has accumulated, written, photographed, presented, and owns (e.g. CDs). In February 2005 an epiphany occurred with the realization that MyLifeBits goes beyond Vannevar Bush’s “memex” and is a personal transaction processing database for everything described in June 14, 2005 SIGMOD Keynote.”


As noted in a previous entry, see “How To Build Your Own version of Gordon Bell’s “MyLifeBits” (Wired)” Wired, Nov 2006. See the complete article “A head for detail.” 


At home, we’ve attempted our own small slice of MyLifeBits, with a couple of scanners (sheet fed and a slick yet inexpensive see-thru HP Scanjet 4600 Scanner), Paperport software (for collecting scans and managing image files) and Windows Desktop Search. In addition, we have the bulk of our bills and statements sent in electronic form.


But we’re not as hard-core as Bell: one of the biggest collection of papers so far that we simply don’t have (or make) the time to process? Paper receipts (a drawer in the kitchen is just easier, thank you), our children’s artwork and schoolwork, and hard copies of a select few magazines: I enjoy having the paper versions of Wired, Fast Company and Fine Homebuilding. Everything else is scanned or referenced on the web, especially nice as so many magazines are now available via on-line archives (usually free for subscribers).