Thursday, January 06, 2005
Microsoft Blogger Scoble On Corporate Transparency
Seems strange for someone from Microsoft to be writing about corporate transparency, but not when that person is Robert Scoble. I really liked some of the stuff he said, especially when he admits the mistake Microsoft made with SmartTags. 
1) People will give better feedback to product teams when they know the guy or gal in charge is actually getting their feedback. Today, say you want to give feedback to the MS Build team, you just open up Google or MSN Search and type "MS Build Blog." There you'll find a guy who actually works on the team. You can leave a comment, or you can send Alex an email. Think this isn't resulting in better products and happier customers?
2) Strong customer evangelists are built by involving customers in your internal business processes. Who are the best (software) evangelists? The ones who know why a particular bug was marked "by design?" Or one that doesn't know anything about how the team built the product? Which one is most likely to send us feedback and tell us when we're screwing up? Which one is most likely to talk about us at their local user group? Or in their classroom?
3) Transparency brings about more moral businesses. Would Microsoft have run into the trouble with SmartTags if the team that designed them had had a blog and explained what they were, how they could be used, and showed an implementation of such? (That feature later was pulled from Internet Explorer due to the PR firestorm that resulted).
