I've been reading http://www.microspotting.com ever since my coworker Alex (aka carpenter-turned-test-manager) was profiled a while back. Great writing, beautiful photography, fun quirky looks at a bunch of Microsoft employees.
Alex's profile is a great reminder of how many different backgrounds people have - he's not the only former carpenter in the team, for one. Another incredibly technical PM I've worked with for years majored in Zoology. Last year I hired a user researcher with a PhD in... well some kind of high-falutin' word I don't even remember, but his thesis was about some kind of enzyme in some kind of gland in some kind of songbird's brain [1]. And as for me, well I was a boring-old CS major... before I dropped out and came here instead. :-)
[1] Also important and worth mentioning: he's really, really, really tall [2] [3]
[2] 6'8"
[3] A fact of which the entire team has a few jollies about [4]
[4] Because tall jokes never get old [5]
[5] Especially when you report to a five feet tall shrimp
I couldn't say it better myself:
P.S. Kudos to the Live Writer team - pretty slick Insert | Video functionality!
Great post from Josh. Although I admit I'm biased about #4 on his list...
With the new 'green' effort with our kitchen supplies, they posted signs in every kitchen:
Outlook 2000:
Outlook 2007:
Breath with me now: Ahhhhh...
I was an Outlook tester during the 2000 release; when the icon was first released internally, we were harshly critical of it in a very public way - it sucks to be the product that gets 'yellow' as your family color because it just doesn't work well at smaller sizes. We were very envious (you might even say 'green') of Excel, and hopping mad (say 'red hot'?) at powerpoint that they got nice icons and we got baby poop.
I heard later on that the designer ended up quitting shortly thereafter (not sure if it's true, never knew her name) and always wondered if our vitriol played a role.
Dare has some good points on the debate around the scalability of twitter, relating it to some similar challenges Exchange has faced over the years. Another related issue is that in a single-instance model where you have a pointer to the content, this increases the number of read I/Os necessary to retrieve data - which could end up being net worse overall (running out of IOPs long before you run out of capacity) than if you just had multiple copies of each piece of data.
We've focused a lot on improving scale over the years but the number one factor in that scale, for Exchange's profile, has been disk IO - which is why we focused so heavily on that in Exchange 2007, reducing it by as much as up to 70% when you follow the configuration guidelines. We're like a geeky band of seven dwarfs, working and humming: "IO, IO, increase the scale we go...." For years I've heard people outside the company say "Exchange can't scale because it's on JET, Exchange needs to move to SQL" - which is just patently ridiculous. The version of JET Exchange uses has been carefully tuned over the years for Exchange's usage profile, which includes random IO and comparatively more writes as compared to reads as mail is constantly flowing in and out of the system; compare this to the IO profiles of many apps built on SQL which have a much higher mix of read vs write IOs.
Of course, I'm simplifying - like Dare says on the twitter debate, there are far more issues here at play. Thankfully there are a bunch of brilliant folks who work on this area in Exchange and do the heavy lifting of architecting the system properly so that customers can enjoy the benefits.
I can't wait until the law against using cellphones while driving goes into effect in Washington state.
Tomorrow is Mother's day. It was also a day on which I was planning to run my first half-marathon, which I have been training for for months.
Yesterday I worked out in the morning, and at the end of the day David and I decided to go bike and pick up the kids from school in the trailer to squeeze in an extra workout.
Like most pacific northwesterners, we actually pay attention to street signals and so during the ride there, we patiently waited until we had the WALK sign and right of way on a busy intersection.
When I was halfway across the intersection, an idiot in the right-hand lane pulled out, covering the entire crosswalk, chatting away on a cellphone and not even looking my way.
I braked fast in order to not slam into her car, fell down, and my bike fell on top of me. And in the process, I banged up my knee - which now hurts when I put pressure on it, so I can't @*#$(@#$ run my @#)$@ half marathon anymore.
I couldn't help but think of Frank who finished 65% of a marathon recently...
Argh. Argh. Argh.
Saw this recently on a web signup form and it took me several seconds to figure out that it wasn't a mistake that the same thing got listed twice:
Following on to my short rant yesterday, I wanted to share some information from a survey we did about a year ago. We surveyed ~1400 people[1] about their email management habits, how overloaded they felt, if they used conversation views, folders, filters/rules, sorting, etc as well as asking them to self-report on how much mail they receive/send/have filtered by rules/etc per day.
We tried very hard to find some something different in the behaviors of the people who felt overloaded vs those who didn't - e.g. surely people who get a lot of email are more likely to feel overloaded, right? Or surely people who take advantage of management features like rules and conversation view feel more on top of things than those who don't?
The answer: Nope. No correlation. From the report written by a researcher on my team: "Crosstabs and frequencies analyses indicate that perceived effectiveness at mail management does not relate to use of Outlook/OWA features (Sorting, Search Folders, etc.), to types of mail received (messages sent by coworkers, thread-related messages, etc.), or to use of Outook/OWA views (primary view, secondary view, level of Conversation View experience)."
Here are the answers for how overwhelmed people felt, one chart for those who worked at microsoft and another for those who didn't:
Another quote: "Factors relating to volume of mail are not as strongly related to mail management effectiveness as might be expected. The strongest “volume” factor is “daily time spent managing mail”: 74% of respondents who find mail management difficult, as compared to only 58% of respondents who manage mail effectively, spend more than 2 hours per day scanning, reading, composing, and organizing mail."
Of course all self-reported data (# of hours spent managing mail, # of messages received) is not necessarily accurate but the lack of correlation between these users' perceptions of their overload and their usage of mail management techniques is very interesting. We also kept the ranges quite broad, for example when we asked about messages received per day the options were spaced as follows: 0-50, 51-100, 101-300, 300+.
[1] Note that the participants were heavily tilted towards a more technical audience - half internal microsoft, half external but the external folks tended to work heavily with software/technology in some way.
I am so tired of reading blog posts that point the finger at email and imply that the problem is that we have too much email and that the solution are other technology streams, 1:many communication, etc.
Guess what folks, email has 1:many too, call them groups or mailing lists or distribution lists or whatever you want, but they are a contributor to the information overload, not a solution.
What we have is a human problem, not anything inherent to email. The lower the barrier to entry for a communications channel (+ the ease of reaching others - i.e. is the audience out there listening) the more it will be used. It doesn't matter if it goes over SMTP or SIP or HTTPs or whatever the Next Big Thing will be.
This is the first rational post I've seen about this issue. We need 'goldpan' solutions - and not just for email but for all these newer communication streams.
And to be clear, I don't think Microsoft (or anyone else) has goldpan solutions yet. We have pieces of sieves, but we still ask users to put them together and come up with their own goldpan. I do believe we'll get there eventually, but progress seems like molasses at times.
That's right - Luke Skywalker. Or, as Jared describes it, "LUCK SKY WOKR". Not too freakin' bad for a four year old!
"An S the best I can try, R2D2, C3P0, TK-41, and Battle Droid"
"Lord Vader" (yes, he calls him Lord Vader. It drives me nuts. "Darth" would do, boy.)
I helped put together a video for Interact that gives a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the Exchange team.
Please don't be scared off by the high production videos and think we're corporate shills - it's just because we got the marketing team to pay for it (score!).
Near the end of the video they have a few shots of various people including myself laughing. I've always wondered what they tell people to make them laugh on camera. So I went in for my interview and at the end, they said "OK we need a shot of you laughing - Joe, tell them your joke" but me being me, I interrupted and said "Oh man, you need a joke to make people laugh, have I got a great one for you."
So I started telling them my joke:[2]
A pirate walks into a bar, with a steering wheel in his pants...
And the entire room erupted in laughter, because apparently that was the exact same joke that Joe had been telling people all day in order to get them to laugh.
So what you see is not me laughing at Joe telling the joke, but me laughing at me telling the joke that happened to be the same joke as Joe's joke. But everyone else, of course, was laughing at Joe's joke.
Capisce?
[1] Actually, I lie - there are no tacos in this blog post. That is simply the name of a store nearby msft campus that I've always found funny. "Two great tastes that taste great together!"
[2] I don't know where I first heard it - it may have been from Eric's blog, but I think I first heard it around some Talk Like A Pirate Day. Man, I love that joke.
I went to the doctor today to get immunizations in preparation for a trip to China at the end of June[1].
There were four shots, so the nurse said she would split them, two on each arm.
She asked me:
"Which hand do you write with?"
and I just couldn't help but smirk and say:
"I don't, really. I type."
Fortunately she wasn't offended, and did later comment on how it was just a standard part of the learned process for giving shots, but it's such an anachronism in this day and age.
[1] Any readers in China want to get together? Sign an NDA and I'll show you exchange 14 :-)
Frank blogs often about how blogs and social networking are really not a revolution but more of a "rapid evolution"... just the latest in a long string of evolving communications mediums.
I have long agreed with his perspective (summarized succinctly here). Certainly the most recent technological advances are amazing, they seem to happen faster every year, and they enrich my life... but it's just an evolution that happens to have taken some quick jumps in recent years. There will be something new next year that is only an idea right now - which let's face it, makes it all the more exciting.
What's most interesting to me is how these mediums have facilitated conversations between softies and customers. From my own personal history with these technologies:
- When I started at the company in 1998[1], I was very active in the beta newsgroups for Outlook 2000 (and that's where I first met the awesome[2] Outlook MVPs)
- The next year I branched out to the public newsgroups - using my personal identity, for some reason I didn't feel comfortable using my microsoft email alias as my identity at that time [3].
- Over the next few years I stayed fairly active in the public newsgroups, but after moving to the Exchange team in 2000 I started to use my microsoft email alias and there was even a period of time when I was the official Communities Program Manager for Exchange[4].
- Of course there was also the most excellent MEC, aka Microsoft Exchange Conference, for those few glorious years which was always a great opportunity to talk to customers.
- I started this blog in 2003[5]
- The blog lit me on fire - it was a fascinating new way to hear from customers. So a few short months later I followed up by starting the Exchange team blog, You Had Me At EHLO. That in turn has been an excellent experience (which, thanks to Nino, is still going strong) which has helped us learn so much more about customers, and although we didn't post the end-to-end story of every customer feedback exchange, the "ship on DVD only" decision was a well-documented one where blog feedback in particular was very helpful.
- Newsgroups began to evolve into web forums although my personal participation dropped off around this point as I changed jobs, and I'd long been more active in the various exchange mailing lists instead and kept tabs on issues raised by the MVPs as a proxy for customers.
- At some point when Google News Alerts became available, I registered for several alerts related to Exchange stories in the press, and I would occasionally do some exchange-related searches on google, technorati and bloglines. I recently signed up for the alerts via google's blogsearch which is mighty handy.
- Most recently has been the very enlightening experience of tweetscanning for exchange... turns out nobody twitters about exchange if it's operating fine :-) I wish I could heal the world...
A recent technorati search is what led me to this blog post by Tyson Kopczynski, and I put the author in touch with the PM for setup to help resolve his issue which I suspected wasn't as simple as what he posted about... Fortunately I was correct, and although the issue isn't resolved yet, Tyson posted a very nice followup about the experience which is what started me on this trip down memory lane in the first place:
Now, I've seen MS people trolling discussion threads, and to some extent blogs. But, it never really occurred to me just how actively they use social mediums to better support their products (Or, maybe this is just the Exchange product team). In other words, it appears the Exchange product team has taken a very proactive stance in order to head off current and future problems, maybe even figure future feature requirements, etc.
In my book, that what they are doing is pretty cool. Such a stance can only lead to better products, which leads to less wackiness, which then leads to more time I have to do other things. :>)
Which brings me back to my original point: The evolving communication mediums are just the latest in an evolutionary line which help us better connect with and understand our customers' scenarios and pain points. Blogging in particular (and its easy integration with search engines) has been great as a scaling mechanism since the previous mechanisms were far more 1:1. These days I manage a research and design team, and I treat these technologies as just another way to do user research.
I can only hope that our efforts in this area will continue to improve, which will lead to better products, which leads to less wackiness, which leads to improving end-user productivity and delight, and letting IT pros get on to do other things. :-)
[1] Holy crikey. It's been ten years?? I need to start buying M&Ms...
[2] Exchange MVPs, you're awesome too. But I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the days when I learned more about my own product on slipstick.com than from internal specs, or having Ken patiently scrutinize my absolutely awful VBA macro code to help me find a bug without once making fun of my coding skills...
[3] To this day, I think SVP Jeanne Sheldon is an incredibly awesome exec because she was A) reading the outlook newsgroups on her own (!!??!), B) saw a post from me using my personal email address, C) recognized me for some reason which is a little unreal considering I was a fairly n00b leaf node and D) sent me a very lovely email that I have saved in my mailbox to this day lauding my skillz and giving me kudos for participating in the community. Seriously, Jeanne - you rock.
[4] Whatever that means. ;-)
[5] Three weeks after coming back to work from maternity leave for my oldest child. I think I probably didn't have enough to do, at the time. Good thing too :-)
