And the winners of the most, and least transparent team at Microsoft awards are...
One of the many interesting things about working at Microsoft is dealing with the occasional raving MS hater. Here I'm not referring to people with legitimate gripes who can formulate logical arguments to make their point; instead I mean people who write our name as Micro$oft (that joke never gets old!) and honestly believe we all spend our time in a hollowed-out volcano lair thinking of new ways to do evil. You know the type - most of them hang out on the forums at Slashdot and CNET.
I've struggled to understand why such people exist. While Microsoft, like all companies, has some blemishes on its record, it requires a perplexing leap in logic to surmise that everyone is constantly and deliberately trying to screw customers over. My best guess is that, for a very long time, Microsoft was essentially a black box to the rest of the world. Money goes in, software comes out, and if anything is not entirely to your liking you can only guess about what went on inside to yield that result.
However I believe that the company as a whole has made great strides over the last three years or so to become much more transparent and accountable to customers. Sites such as MSDN and Technet Blogs, Channel 9, Channel 10 and CodePlex all provide ways for you to see inside the box, and for Microsofties to see outside. Hopefully the conversations happening in these forums give the product teams the insight required to build better products and do better by customers. And regardless of what result we end up with, the increased visibility should help everyone see us as real people, flawed like everyone else, but trying to do the best job possible under complex constraints.
So if we've made such great strides towards greater transparency and accountability, how come the raving Micro$oft bashing crowd still exist? Well for one, I think some of these people have so much bitterness (for right or wrong reasons) that it will take quite a bit more time for them to start thinking rationally again, but I do think we're going in the right direction. Still I also believe that we can, and must, do a lot better than we are now. (As an aside, I'd like to hear your opinions on what other commercial software companies are doing a better job at community engagement and transparency than Microsoft is right now).
Right now I believe the company's biggest problem with community engagement is that the wealth is not spread evenly across the different teams. Some (in my opinion) do an absolutely fantastic job of explaining what they are thinking before committing to plans, soliciting feedback to change those plans, and keeping everyone informed on progress at every step of the way. Others are still in the black box mentality, and some are halfway in between.
But of course it's not my opinion that matters - it's yours. So I'd like you to nominate which teams in Microsoft you believe are doing the best job at engaging with the community, and which teams are most in need of improvement. Why am I asking this? Because I believe that it's critical for the entire company to become more transparent, and I want to make sure the teams in question know when you think they are doing a good or a bad job.
