Michael sees a lot of confusion and mixed messages coming out of Redmond lately. Particularly with IE and Longhorn, but also concerning DRM and Xbox.
Does Microsoft Instill Fear And Confusion?
Editor’s Note: Does Microsoft cultivate an atmosphere of confusion and fear? Read Robert’s article and and see what you think. Discuss your feeling towards Microsoft at WebProWorld.
I wish teams could talk about our plans in all these areas, but I’ve learned to just keep quiet about future plans until you have betas to play with. Avalon and Indigo previews just came out last week for public looks. So, things are starting to loosen up.
Michael: let’s talk again when we get you a real beta of these various things to play with. You’re making a lot of assumptions based on rumors or things you’ve heard in the press. I want you to be harsh and critical of us, but not based on anything but the real product choices we’ve made. So, let’s meet again later this year after IE7, Longhorn, the new Xbox, and our DRM strategy comes out.
Believe it or not, we do listen to customer feedback (yeah, sometimes that loop is far from perfect). In fact, the reason you saw some confusing stuff come out of the Longhorn team is DIRECTLY attributable to customer feedback.
As for being hard to use, I complain about that stuff all the time. Keep up the heat. I’m finding that most teams do listen and are working on improving their products. It’s a bit frustrating at times waiting for improvements to ship, though, and we’re working internally a lot about how to improve that cycle as well.
Along these lines, I’m to blame for some of the confusion as well. Howso? Well, recently I said that Aero (the new UI in Longhorn) doesn’t rely on Avalon (the new graphic APIs). Pablo Fernicola, the guy who runs the Avalon team, told me that isn’t quite true.
The confusing thing is, if I explained all this I’d need to show you Longhorn and explain its architecture to you to really keep from confusing the issue even further. I can’t do that in public yet (and even if I could, I’d screw it up.
It’s far better to have someone who really understands Avalon, like Chris Anderson, or the Avalon team, do that). So, instead of trying, let’s meet up later this year when we can really have an open and transparent conversation about all this stuff. It won’t be too much longer before we can really talk about what the product teams are doing.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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