Before continuing on, I suggest reading Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 of this series. The OSS Transparency Comparison IMHO, this is the least interesting part of my digression here but probably the most likely to be slashdotted. Nothing like doing your...

Before continuing on I suggest reading Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Measuring Customer Gains of Your Transparency Before digging into the subjective measurements I’d like to post a couple of disclaimers. Transparency is not something that every customer...

Before reading this I suggest reading Part 1 of the series . Commonly Perceived Fears People face a natural fear of increased openness. Some simply aren't inclined to talk about what they are working on, some are scared that there isn't a good way to...

I'm a big believer in corporate transparency as a means to increase trust and communication with customers. Can a big corporation be better at transparency than a open source group today? Where should groups at Microsoft or other corporations draw the...

It was a family tradition to always read the predictions from a tabloid magazine on New Years Eve as a form of entertainment. It seems that predictions are going around , it’s always fun attempting to guess the future, and I’m currently in-between rounds...

One reason that my team (Developer Division Customer Connection Team) exists is to ultimately raise developer satisfaction. Its our belief that we can effect satisfaction by improving the product group team connections with their customers. Its always...

I'm going to soon be unsubscribing from a lot of blogs. The number of Microsoft blogs has gotten insane and trying to keep up with the main feed is next to impossible. I'm going to start being selective, but I'd still like to know when a new blogger comes...

Internally I try and send out mails that recognize cool contributions Microsoft people have made to the community every other month. In the latest issue I wrote a little poem to go with the mail. It's been suggested that I post this to my blog as well...

Ok, I know I just raved about my new phone like every other MS employee. No, they are not just dropping them off at everyones door. Yes, they do give us a pretty good discount on them. I spent a lot of time over the last few days trying to learn everything...

Scoble is taking some heat for this post and his letter to Bill about creating an interesting music player that a fellow "softy" described as the " Most Insulting Blog Entry of The Year ". Judging from the comments and the trackbacks, Ed is not the only...

Just a quick shout out to Neil Enns (PM on the Visual Studio Devices team) who resolved my concern that I couldn't disconnect my new Audiovox smartphone from the GPRS network. Apparently , once the connection is established to the data network the Smartphone...

I've been involved in several chats hosted on MSDN recently. Today I was talking to someone internally who was also working on scheduling chats for his team. We both complained about the overhead involved in scheduling and running a chat at Microsoft...

Some of you have noticed (I've been IM'd and e-mailed) that I've turned on comment moderation. I have no intentions of making this permanent, but recently I've been having to delete 50-100 blog comment spam messages each day. This far outweighs the cost...

Part two of yesterdays idea ... I read a lot of feeds. I try to only keep them around for 30 days. But I haven't found a great way to archive the best content or best feeds in a way that lets me get that information back again. Some might suggest that...

Apparently, starting in 05, January is " Be Nice to a Recruiter Month " and Chris has already started spreading the word . You never know, it could be good for you down the road. I've learned you at least don't want to be on a recruiters bad side. Gretchen...

I installed the MSN Desktop Search suite yesterday. The outlook integration is nice, I like the easy search on the task-bar, but I disabled the web toolbar since I mostly use the google version for web search still. The content that seemed missing was...

Sandy looked up community on Wikipedia . Then she questioned whether Feedback Driven Development is community... "So when you look at the activities p&p is doing, are they really “community”? Certainly the group of customers that we are trying to...

I took some heat before for suggesting that people should file their bugs against the VS Betas on the Feedback Center as part of the Smart Client bug reporting challenge. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment because I'm going to link the our ongoing ...

Yeah, the Google Suggest thing is pretty cool, but what was more interesting to me was that this proved that something useful can be done with the 20% "google time". In an earlier post Dare had questioned if it was only a myth that this time could be...

No, it's not podcasting, " FeedSpeaker " is actual text to MP3 conversion from an RSS feed. Now if they add a regular scheduled checker and support multiple feeds to multiple MP3 files you could create some awesome RSS generated playlists to listen to...

Jonathan Schwartz, from Sun, examined IBM's Departure from the PC Industry and takes current subscription trends to make the case for a zero cost PC over time. "the devices are sold to consumers as part of subscription calling plans, whose long term value...

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000834.html They offer some good reasons for anyone implemented a community driven application to think through the role of profile and identity in your application and what pieces of that information can help the community...

My commute seems to get longer each morning so I just can't help but trying to think of ways to make it better. I use a cassette adapter to hook my iPod into my car stereo. My car has built in controls for the stereo on the steering wheel, but it's frustrating...

Continuing with my driving theme from Friday ... Why not link those "Your Speed" traffic signs on local roads up to a traffic monitoring web site? From there you could see the "Average speed for the last X Car" reports that would give you a good idea...

This probably falls into the "I just haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it exists" catagory... Why don't cars have cameras pointing to the left and right of the bumper so that you can see oncoming vehicles when you are pulling out of a parking spot and...