Earlier this week, I provided a couple of glimpses at how product groups listen and respond to customers and partners. In the seven plus years I've been at Microsoft, I've seen lots of different ways how product teams listen and respond to customers....

It's fitting: Japan has Doraemon for anime and Microsoft Oz has a whimsical cartoon character to help citizens prepare for the upcoming end to daylight saving time in Australia. Another example of listening and responding to customers... No sooner had...

A popular question over the last few days... "What is going on in Iraq next week on daylight saving time?" As I noted earlier, it looks like Iraq will not observe daylight saving time this year . The change is currently scheduled to take effect...

Just as I (finally!) near the point of completing Halo 3 on Heroic, I learn that the add-on Heroic map set is available for free. (Full disclosure: my nine-year-old has already whooped me by completing the last level in Halo 3 at the highest level......

As I initially reported , we now have it on reasonable authority that Iraq will not switch to daylight saving time as they have in the past, and as noted online and on the Hot Topics for Daylight Saving Time changes site. As we have more information,...

Yesterday I posted how the Dynamics team listens to the voice of the customer, with Speak Your Mind . Today, a look back at some of the various ways product teams get feedback from customers in my previous post, Microsoft Product Feedback Links , and...

I woke up today and logged on to mail to find not one or two messages, but more than a few questions about support from Microsoft on SP1... "Is Microsoft helping customers with SP1 installations?" "If someone went to [Windows Update] last week...

As I posted yesterday in Hearing the voice of the customer- learning how to listen and respond , I reflected that sometimes it's more difficult for larger, more complex and diverse companies to nimbly listen and respond. And it seems that as you get larger...

Before we prepared lunch for the kids yesterday, I was forwarded an article from Advertising Age this week, A Digital Conference With Some Humility: Day 2 . In it, editor Matthew Creamer highlighted some of the action at the recent Ad Age Digital Marketing...

Breaking: Sony Won't Charge $50 To Remove Bloatware | Gadget Lab from Wired.com Peter Sayer of infoWorld noted noted in an article yesterday that Sony initially offered to remove some of the trial software installed on new laptops for a fee... ...

I was asked this week via email from my blog... "SP1 is available now. What's the best way to install the new service pack for Vista?" SP1 was launched this week and a couple of our PCs at home installed the update directly from the Microsoft. As I noted...

Now it's really official. And not just on Amazon.com... ;) As noted this morning by Nick on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Windows Vista SP1 has been released to Windows Update ... "Today, you can now download Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update. For those...

My friend, Sean, has a post from January on how he's not feelin' the love so much from McDonald's , specifically how the company doesn't accept unsolicited proposals. This was sent to me today: http://www.mcdonalds.com/contact/contact_us/unsolicited_ideas...

Thanks to a confirmation on Computerworld , Gregg Keizer writes that the release of Windows Vista SP1 will be out tomorrow ... "In an e-mail meant to clarify when Amazon.com could begin shipping retail copies of Vista SP1, a company spokeswoman...

It's a weekend of "learning how to complain" stories. Do I sense a trend? In my post on Get some satisfaction- article notes that complaints can pay off with several basic steps , I blogged about the article How to Get Some Satisfaction Customer complaints...

Microsoft has learned of a potential change to the observance of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in Iraq that may impact customers using the Baghdad time zone. An early, unsubstantiated report is that the Ministry of Iraq has decided that the country will...

Don Tennant of ComputerWorld has an interview this week with Steve Schuckenbrock of Dell Computer in his article, Q&A: Dell exec addresses service woes in run-up to IT-as-a-service launch . Tennant caught up with Schuckenbrock, the president of their...

NJ.com (The Times site) has an article this week, How to Get Some Satisfaction Customer complaints can pay off with several basic steps by Greg Saitz... "It's likely almost every adult resident of New Jersey has felt stepped on and ripped off, insulted...

Yesterday, the Detroit Free Press presented two views on the changes to the schedule on daylight saving time in 2007: one that it saves energy and another that it doesn't. These read like a Point-Counterpoint discussion on ABC News , and my unscientific...

Welcome to another installment of the reading pile, a collection of things on the web (and a few references to the hardcopy items with online versions). The past week -- as always -- has been a busy one, with changes to DST in Chile, the revelation that...

Chile changes their DST dates to save energy, but one professor and grad student found that it costs rather than saves money in the US. Once again, we have changes in South America, this time in the Republic of Chile , as noted here on the TZ and DST...

Related to the regular updates made to our pages on time , Steven asked this week... "Is there something that customer can plug into, like subscribing to monthly security alerts, for DST [and, I'll add, time zone] updates?" No, not directly....

Last November, I noted that I turned down the spam comments on my blog , limiting the time to post comments. Well, that strategy worked and I've decided to experiment by increasing the time to post comments, from seven days to 14. We'll see how that holds...

Of interest today from MIX '08 is this coverage in the Seattle Times of the interview with Steve Ballmer by Seattle Times technology reporter Benjamin J. Romano . The on-stage interviewer was my old friend Guy Kawasaki of Apple, Garage.com and truemors...

Brace yourselves... it's that time again. That's right: it's the start of Daylight Saving Time in much of the US and Canada, as noted in more than 2,200 news articles today . "Huh? It's not for a couple of more weeks," one person said yesterday...