Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Microsoft to Self: "What? We Have a Left Hand? What is it Doing?"
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 01:00 AM
"Normally, you should think, that a company like Microsoft is offering highly integrated services and normally they do if you take the integration of Windows Mobile into the PC and server environment with all the sync functionalities, etc but now imagine you bought a new Windows Mobile Pocket PC, you would like to start using MSN Messenger the first time and a friend tells you, that you need a Microsoft Passport account. Not a big deal at all, since you have the Internet in your pocket and you should be able to easily create such an account right from your Pocket PC. Ok, so far the theory..."
An interesting, if quirky, discovery by Arne Hess over at the::unwired. In a nutshell, this boils down to the fact that Microsoft is a very large organization, and as is quite often the case with such things, one group has no idea what the other group is working on. But here's the real key to all this: each group at Microsoft needs to think about how their product or service works with other Microsoft products and services.
A year or two ago, Steve Balmer made a speech in which he talked about every the core importance of "working better together". The idea was that every Microsoft product should work better than anything else on the market with other Microsoft products. It doesn't seem like many groups at Microsoft were paying attention, because it's rare to find any Microsoft product that has specific features in it to allow it to work better with other Microsoft products. Sure, there are tiny steps in the right direction, but overall I think it's pretty dismal. Witness the fact that I still can't sync Notes from Exchange with my Pocket PC after, what, six years? Sad.
I think every Microsoft product team should have a checklist of every other Microsoft product, and they should sit down and figure out if their product has any synergy with any other product, and hammer out how they can tap into that. Microsoft needs to start taking this much more seriously than they currently are.
An interesting, if quirky, discovery by Arne Hess over at the::unwired. In a nutshell, this boils down to the fact that Microsoft is a very large organization, and as is quite often the case with such things, one group has no idea what the other group is working on. But here's the real key to all this: each group at Microsoft needs to think about how their product or service works with other Microsoft products and services.
A year or two ago, Steve Balmer made a speech in which he talked about every the core importance of "working better together". The idea was that every Microsoft product should work better than anything else on the market with other Microsoft products. It doesn't seem like many groups at Microsoft were paying attention, because it's rare to find any Microsoft product that has specific features in it to allow it to work better with other Microsoft products. Sure, there are tiny steps in the right direction, but overall I think it's pretty dismal. Witness the fact that I still can't sync Notes from Exchange with my Pocket PC after, what, six years? Sad.
I think every Microsoft product team should have a checklist of every other Microsoft product, and they should sit down and figure out if their product has any synergy with any other product, and hammer out how they can tap into that. Microsoft needs to start taking this much more seriously than they currently are.
