Friday, January 9th, 2004
I get a lot of emails from folks surprised about how open Microsoft is being
lately, mostly due to all of the blogging we’ve been doing lately (some of us
started long before we ever became employees). However, even I was surprised in
an internal blogging meeting today filled with a bunch of MS bloggers. During
the meeting, we talked about a bunch of the benefits to MS and to our customers.
Sara talked about how blogs are driving more traffic to MSDN than our own
headlines. Robert described his “green, yellow, red” scale for determining
whether to blog about something (believe it or not, he does decide not to
sometimes : ).
And then Adam Sohn from marketing talked about the need to
police ourselves, describing some of the downsides in regards to blowing some
group’s launch plans or unconstructively criticizing another group. He preached
caution when approaching the line between what was good for the customer and
what was good for Microsoft. After listening to what I began to interpret as a
message of self-censorship, I asked Adam a warm up, “Isn’t it true that a lot of
the stuff close to the ‘line’ is what our customers find most valuable?” He
agreed that it was. And then I asked Adam my real question, “So, when we get
close to that line, do we err on the side of our customer or ourselves?”
Now, you have to remember that I’ve been a contributing member of the Windows
development community for a lot of years. I’ve seen how aggressive Microsoft is
in everything it does to always be on top. So when I asked on what side of the
line I should come down, I fully expected to be told to keep the shareholders in
mind.
Of course, you know what his answer was or this story wouldn’t have
made it into my blog until after my tenure at MS was complete (or just before :
). He said, without hesitation, “Err on the side of the customer.”
That
blew me away. Of course, I’ve been doing just that since before I became an MS
employee and Robert rides the ragged edge all day long, but it was *very* nice
to hear that guy with the PR and legal battle scars tell me to keep the customer
first and foremost in my mind.
Thanks, Adam. You’ve confirmed my decision
to work at Microsoft.
