Are Products Better Because of Blogs?
on 04.04.06, 08:47pm in weblog • share on facebook • comments (12)
I’ve been thinking about Werner’s "Naked Answers" ever since it caused a tear in the fabric of the blog universe last week. Wow, it’s amazing at the stir that can be unleashed just by questioning the gospel of the red couch.
Without question, Microsoft has become more ‘transparent’ with all of the corporate bloggers out there, which is great if you want to contact someone on a product team directly or have a specific question or a gripe. And for small companies, sure, a mention on Scoble can get you noticed.
But I have to ask a simple question: Do you think corporate (in this case Microsoft) blogging has made our products better?
I’m curious on your thoughts.
Jim (April 4, 2006 @ 9:55 pm)
I believe it’s important for companies to be transparent. Eric Sink (former MS employee from IE) convinced me of this in an article he wrote on the subject for MSDN: http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Transparency.html
I was thrilled to find a blog by one Chris Pratley from the OneNote 12 team where I read an article about new features coming down the pipe. I was able to post a comment on three concerns I had as a non-tablet PC user. I needed a better way to type math formulas, create circuit diagrams, and draw graphs (all presumably with the mouse). I explained that like many engineering students, needed a powerful PC for those engineering apps, and a tablet-pc was just not the best bang for the buck.
Cool! My feedback will be read by the PM on a big project and maybe I’ll actually be able to start using OneNote and get rid of my notebook in the near future.
However his response was mildly disappointing, Math has been taken care of in Office 12 in general (cool), however when it came to the other points I basically felt he said “Ink is the standard” and that I should get a tablet. (again I can’t afford a tablet)
However, a few months later in an in person conversation with Adam U. http://blogs.msdn.com/adamu he suggested to me to get a Wacom Tablet as that’s what they use to test OneNote. This was a much better suggestion.
Reguardless of how I felt about his answer, actually being able to communicate with someone on the team and have them respond is a very good thing.
So yes, I think it can help if you:
“Listen to your users
And be transparent. Let yourself be accountable for listening to your users. The main reason SourceGear did a Dreamweaver plugin is because we have a public support forum where dozens of people asked us to do one. This is one of our most common feature requests. How could we ignore them?
Your users have things to say. Stop telling them how great your software is and listen to them tell you how to make it better.” –Eric Sink
Jeff Atwood (April 4, 2006 @ 11:57 pm)
Are you kidding me?
People thought Microsoft was the Borg cube, man! Knowing that there are actual people running around in there– some of them incredibly smart, funny, and great communicators to boot– is *exactly* what Microsoft needed.
Amazon might not need it as much because there isn’t this huge, opaque veneer of ill will built around it. Yet.
There’s one forming around Google, though.
thomas woelfer (April 5, 2006 @ 3:23 am)
nope.
WM_MY0.02$
thomas woelfer
Steve (April 5, 2006 @ 6:11 am)
Jeff - that’s my point. Sure, we’re not the borg. No kidding. MS has lots of intelligent and funny people.
But are the products any better due to that transparency?
Jeff Atwood (April 5, 2006 @ 9:48 am)
> But are the products any better due to that transparency?
I’d say Jensen Harris’ blog is pretty strong evidence that the products ARE better because of the dialog.
And when I see Lazycoder remark that Scott Guthrie is his favorite feature in ASP.NET, that clinches it.
Steve (April 5, 2006 @ 12:32 pm)
That is, of course, if you like the Ribbon
Brandon Tyler (April 5, 2006 @ 12:44 pm)
I think that the next version of MSS 2007 will be much better because of blogs. Already they are blogging and getting feedback.
grovberg (April 5, 2006 @ 12:50 pm)
I’ll swiftly side step the actual question just to point out that I couldn’t agree more with Werner about how tiresome it is to see everyone rushing around trying to figure out how they can label something as blogging even if they already have tools that serve the same function. The thinking doesn’t go much further than, “Everyone’s talking about blogging. I want blogging too!”
Sounds like Furrygoat’s law all over again.
Werner (April 5, 2006 @ 2:02 pm)
Caveat: I get weblogs. Otherwise I wouldn’t be maintaining one.
A question: One part of MS that has benefited from maintaining weblogs are the folks who have developers as customers. Clearly all the parties in that conversation are very comfortable with the medium and it can be a good S/N if you are lucky. How would you rate that against the influence that community forums have/had on products, where developers could discuss specific products. Forums have the advantage that customers can start threads and it can lead to equally high content discussions. I actually like to believe that the S/N in forums can be better than that in weblogs as you concentrate the collective energy in a single place.
If I look at the S3 (Amazon’s storage service) forums, there is so much going on especially in terms of high-value feedback, I don’t know whether we would get the same thing out of an S3 weblog. There would be room for an S3 weblog, but it would serve a different purpose than getting access to product feedback.
Jeff Atwood (April 5, 2006 @ 3:50 pm)
> One part of MS that has benefited from maintaining weblogs are the folks who have developers as customers
Yes, this is true. Developers who care enough to read blogs is already a very constrained audience. Especially when compared to Amazon’s audience of.. well, anyone who buys anything online. That clearly doesn’t scale.
> I actually like to believe that the S/N in forums can be better than that in weblogs as you concentrate the collective energy in a single place.
It *CAN* be, but it doesn’t last. Forums succumb to the tragedy of the commons faster than any other online medium I can think of. See Clay Shirky’s writings on this, eg, “Communities, Audience, and Scale” and “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”.
There’s definitely a place for forums, but a blog is a fundamentally different– and in many ways, better– form of communication. It’s akin to a highly selective micro-forum filled with micro-content.
Basically, we’re feeding Google and building the long tail of information.
SBrickey (April 19, 2006 @ 6:46 pm)
As a non-MS employee (though definately nerd-esk, IT employed, and certainly not the clueless amazon buyer, but) I thought perhaps I’d share my view:
If i’m having problems with some software, one place to check is obviously going to be google.. sure if the blog happens to talk about that specific detail, hoo ha… but that’s not really *ever* been the case for me so far. Maybe i’m just not lookin up the easy/basic stuff.
That said, if i ever wanted to know anything about exchange (problems admin’ing it, etc), the first place i’ll check is the team’s website… while it uses a blog-like format, it seems to be used for more constructive uses than most blogs i see (maybe that’s the best way to put it ;))… their postings/articles/blogs are usually some of the most up to date with regard to features/capabilities/requirements, and based on the feedback I see on their site I have to believe they’re in contact with a nice segment of the “more technical” admins taking the most advantage of Exchange.
So in general I don’t see it affecting the opinion of the product, i’ll still think highly of exchange either way… that SP2 (admittedly “finally”) upped the limit to 75gb is nice, and EHLO had it covered. I also think that some of the Channel9 stuff has a similar effect on a broader range of topics, so perhaps that’s an example of the silver lining? (maybe it depends on how well they as a team are doing?)
hope I didn’t drone on too long.
-SB
KC Lemson (May 24, 2006 @ 10:00 pm)
That’s because exchange rocks.
Hell yeah the blog has made our product better. I love it.