What would you like to see Microsoft do differently this year?

Beer28 wrote:

Sven Groot wrote:What is it with computers and car analogies anyway?

Linux is the volkswagon!

I'd say Linux is more like a kit... you put it together yourself, and if it breaks you fix it yourself.

scobleizer wrote:

What would you like Microsoft to do differently this year?

- Presentations.
- Take a lesson on what communism is, and why centralised control is one of the defining characteristics in non-theoretical socialism.

Rossj wrote:

^
Another Firefox user - are you actually ever going to fix that bug?

It's probably a FreeTextBox bug, not a Channel9 bug.

Well that's okay then. Feel free to leave it there.

dnrfan: if I prepared questions ahead of time the teams would want to see them and prepare for them. Wouldn't be good. That's what MSDN TV is for.

I'll try to be steadier. This is an artifact of doing it all with one person instead of having a camera crew (and the fact that I am doing this with lightweight equipment, same as what you could buy at BestBuy. On the other hand you get to see people and hear their opinions in a way that'd never happen if a crew came along.

Yeah, audio is something we gotta work on.

The thing is there are some guiding principles that I'm following:

1) Use as little equipment as possible. Why? Because that puts people at ease and helps them give more candid answers. I've watched what happens when a camera crew shows up with lights, mics, and a big camera. People start "acting."

2) Have as few people involved as possible. Why does that matter? Well, again, people act less candid when more people are there. They feel more "on stage." I saw this one time when an interviewee's boss was in her office. She couldn't get a word out. Boss left, she became nice and casual again.

3) Make it as close to what you can do on real-world equipment as possible. One of the things I'm trying to show is that anyone can do videos. The only real barrier is distribution.

As to video quality. This is a function of how much bandwidth these things take up. Unfortunately I don't have an unlimited budget here, so have to live within some constraints. I'm experimenting with higher resolution stuff, though. Yeah, even Microsoft has to worry about how much bandwidth we're chewing through.

Sven Groot wrote:

What is it with computers and car analogies anyway?

It's a convient comparison device. You know, it's like the Seven-Eleven of comparison devices.

Not sure if I have anything that MS did to annoy, but I'd like to see (on C9?) more of the marketing side. I want to see the real people behind the marketing team. I want to see how they make some of the decisions they made. It's a totally non-techie side, and I think that'd be interesting.

ZippyV wrote:

Lower the software prices.

I second that. I would also like to see Longhorn and XBox 2.

scobleizer wrote:

Macromedia is asking "What do you find to be the most obnoxious thing about Macromedia right now?" So, thought it'd be a good time to ask something similar: "what would you like Microsoft to do differently this year?"

I'm really happy with microsofts work.

Next year I'd like to see MS promote the security fixes in SP2 more actively. There are sooo many people out there who still don't appreciate these improvements.

I think MS should promote specific features of IE that make it a browser that can hold its own against Firefox. For example, the new popup blocking (which many people don't know about).

Also IE's dhtml performance should be promoted. It really out performs Firefox in this aspect. A Firefox user recently wrote a review on one of my dhtml games. He said that the performance difference between IE and FF makes him want to boot up IE. Here's his comments:

http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/jblog/archives/000565.php3

MS should promote this sort of thing to help maintain a fair %age of browser market. I can't help thinking MS are just sitting back and watching FF steal the browser market.

Other than this, I don't think MS need to do much differently. I think MS is doing a great job and has been very open about their plans and new projects. This is appreciated.

Cheers,
Brent.

In addition to my other comments, I have to agree with Jamie (again.. ),
Microsoft has a bad reputation (deserved or undeserved is debatable). That being said, Microsoft needs to overcome it (see my last post). One great way of doing it is becoming an Advocate for consumer technology (Lobbying for more bandwidth, more computers in homes, etc..).

To paraphrase Alicia Silverstone, they need to use their power for good, not evil.

thanks - i thought it was a good way to help make sence of all the right/left stuff thats been going on

Capitalism is GOOD - but the signals MS are sending
are very CORP - lighten up a bit - and beat OSS to the center



PS - add: Not enough Application support under Left

I want MS to come up with a company mascot (and not as crappy as the MSN butterfly...).

Think of the fun the MS community could have, creating anti-linux/BSD/OSX/etc images where the MS mascot kill/mames/dominates tux or the BSD demon (whatever his name is)..

Kudos! Collecting the feedback is exactly what needs to be done. Now...what are you going to do with it? And by when?

This car would be the ultimate OS:


Powerful (300bhp), incredibly fast (0-60mph in 2.9s, if you can change gears fast enough), cheap (only 29000 pound), lightweight (only 456kg), very, very open (you can see straight into its inner workings), and somehow, still gorgeous to look at.
The only thing in the world that was faster around Top Gear's test track was the Ferrari Enzo, which is about 15 times more expensive...

So, will Longhorn be the Ariel Atom of operating systems?

Christopher: I just answered a bit over in the comment section of that blog.

But I forward a lot of this feedback on. Plus, my blog and Channel 9 have visibility very high in the company.

I'm forwarding emails to the teams and will remember this feedback when I go around with Channel 9's camcorder.

How about moving into the VOIP market?
Surely it wouldn't be to hard to fit some voip functionallity into messanger. Get some sort of service up and running like skype's SkypeOut. or even use skypeout??

I think this, along with the work MS is alreay doing in the Media Center area could really help bring more cool tech to the masses.

I saw this on your blog, but I didn't think of anything until I just downloaded the Spyware Beta. 

OK, this is turning into a rant.  And I don't have time to write it cleaner and more objectively.  I apologize and this is the best I can do right now.

--rant begins--
The first practice I want to see put in this year is people not providing links to the .exe in the download center and instead refering people at least to the download page, so they can see the beta declaration, advice about support and so on, and also be satisfied that they are making a download of an official MS distribution (even beta).  After all, the greatest way to place malware on a computer is as a payload in erstwhile security software, yes?  People associated with MSFT should know better. 

But this does get me to the second recommendation.  I think it comes to not allowing developers to run as administrator, and that includes the guys who make stuff for MSN.  I don't want MSN Desktop search running in my administrator account, and I certainly don't want it running in the administrator account of my wife's system, where there should be no unnecessary services ready-to-hand as temptations for thoughtless behavior. (I finally figured out how to get Outlook be safe at the administrator level by not giving it any accounts to use, that was the best I could do, and that meant I couldn't run the MSN Outlook Coordinator or whatever it is called on the system at all, because it insisted on running in the administrator account too).

I think something dramatic has to happen around making desktop systems work well with simply-administered products.  I don't want to have an MCSE to administer my wife's desktop for her, so asking me questions about ICMP in my installation of the XP SP2 Firewall without giving me a clue as to the consequences of my choices is really awful.  A lot of MSFT security stuff is like that. 

OK, so design simply-administrable systems for small SOHO purposes.  All systems should be so simply-administrable and it should be the real dogfood.  And always walk the talk in every way, every day.

That means stop requiring Microsoft sites to be privileged for mobile code and ActiveX in order for people to do something useful and maybe important (like report a security problem or troubleshoot a problem).  So all of the advice that is given about the 3S's, cutting down the exposure footprint of the browser, etc., is then countered by MSFT requiring lowering of defenses to get anything useful done.  (Actually, on MSN I just click the irritating do not permit ActiveX reminder all of the time and find that I lose nothing by ActiveX being declined.)

So, I bet you the spyware stuff still privileges MSFT and I notice the firewall comes prepped to do that.

What exactly is the lesson you want all of us to learn by what you do rather than what you say?

end-of-rant

High-level summary: MSFT needs to get real about who their systems are for, and how they support that.  They also need to get real about what business they are in and how they walk their own talk.  I don't think I should trust a media- and advertising-oriented business to offer me security against adware and malware, for example.

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I'd like to see some form of sender verification built into Hotmail.
Not just "yes, the Hotmail server sent this message" but some kind of
public/private key signing thing.  This could use S/MIME or PGP, or
both, or either at user preference.  That would be totally sweet.  And
GMail doesn't have it.
Hushmail does something similar... but I think Microsoft could do it
better...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: pub key http://matthew.vaneerde.com/pgp-public-key.asc

iD8DBQFB3b0NUQQr0VWaglwRAvK+AJ9rzBYocCMhUAgD4SCk6XFaegg0TQCdH2Mn
hh/rGizyMrx+TxGE0/LPBNI=
=UYvI
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EDIT: something like this... S/MIME wouldn't have all the extra PGP text of course...

new Gates interview:

http://news.com.com/Gates+taking+a+seat+in+your+den/2008-1041_3-5514121.html

from article:

Q: News.com
 
In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: Gates

No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

>>>>>>>>

re: what would i like to see microsoft do differently this year?

Stop refering to customers (that are concerned about too much corporate control) as COMMUNISTS