Mad Product Management.

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Scott Barnes

I almost always am asked "What does a Product Manager do?" whenever people read my previous title. It is one of these titles within the industry that depending on which brand you belong to has different meanings.

The industry way.

Inside Microsoft it varies, you could be the source of power or you could simply be a reactive title that is less Management and more Marketing. What I mean to say is, inside Microsoft a Product Manager can often simply be a Product Marketer whereby they wait until the Program Manager’s decide the features and then the Product Management / Marketing team go to work in communicating the features to the masses.

It takes on a somewhat reactive role as in the end the Product Manager’s main priority is to convince the Program Manager(s) to add xyz features to their engineering "things I need to build list". If that can’t succeed then you try alternate routes by going to concepts like Product Unit Managers, Vice Presidents or General Manager(s) – basically from my own experience inside Microsoft it can be a game of "Lord of the Flies" – figure out who has the conch and do as much as you can in terms of convincing them with data / opinion sooner rather than later.

Outside Microsoft, I have found that to be different, for example recently I have had some chats with Apple around how they do product management and it was interesting to hear that the person(s) in that role (kind of) are the one-stop shop of the power seat. Engineering don’t do a thing unless there is a market to sell the features to in that the Product Manager(s) role is to figure out what’s basically a sellable feature based on market data (need vs. want, differentiation and so on). I have also heard rumors that this is how Adobe does things as well (be curious to see how Google run the show, but given their strong DNA of ex-Microsofties me thinks the Microsoft way of life may propagate upstream).

I am yet to really pin down specifically how the correct formula works here as again, each brand has their own unique perspective on the role. My thinking, mainly because I am arrogant – you are doing it wrong.

The Barnes / Mad Men way.

A colleague of mine had this brilliant way of explaining how he’d setup a team for his start-up and he called it "Mike’s Eleven" (aka Ocean’s Eleven). Each person brings a unique attribute to the team that helps you rob people. You do not bring in a person to the team unless they can really contribute. I like to think of this in much the way of my favorite TV show – Mad Men.

The Don Drapper (aka Director)

This person is like Mad Men’s Don Draper, smooth talking has brilliant insights into the way marketing engines work and lastly knows how to keep a steady but calming influence over the others. I’d highly recommend this person at least have an MBA – whilst as douche as that sounds – but this degree isn’t as easy as people think to get and lastly it brings a lot of Wikipedia of marketing to the table (whilst mostly theory based). If this person is marketing your product as if it was Soup and not Software, you may get some left field thinking into the equation. Hiring an ex-engineer to be your Don Draper is useless, as they cannot think creatively / laterally most of the time – given the OCD / problem solving skills they have already tuned.

The Roger Sterling (aka Community / Client Liaison)

This character in Mad Men has a famous quote in the TV series – "Let me put it in account terms, do you know how many hand jobs I have to give to fix what you’ve just done?"

That is a quote worth remembering when it comes to your Community liaison person(s). These people have one goal and that is to figure out what the client(s) or customer(s) want the most. They play a game of contact sport, whereby they are rarely in the office and are constantly out in the field getting insights into how the product is shaping up each version you produce. This role is expensive, but worth it provided they are steered in the right direction (it’s not all about hotels and bar tabs).

The goals for this person is to firstly create rock stars, do not be the one in the room on stage find others to put on stage to evangelize your product(s). They also need to avoid conferences as much as they can and instead meat businesses at their front door. You do not learn a lot from meeting the same people repeatedly at the same conferences but you do learn a lot when you sit in on a technology decision-making meeting inside a random mining, finance, medical or start-up company in blah country.

They are your socialite and spy in one.

The Lane Pryce / Paul Kinsey (aka Domain Experts).

You need someone in the room who is your in-house engineer. This person will work with your non-technical minds to come up with a simplified way of approaching the set of features you want to build. Let us face it some features in most software are left field in either complexity or mickey mouse go no-where thinking. The Technical side kicks figures out ways to make the feature work kind of your early prototype but more so they are looking at it from a pragmatic perspective.

Say the Don Draper & Roger Sterling want to build a concept whereby the software can do facial recognition to avoid Security logins for PC’s of tomorrow. Now their job is to determine if there is a market for it and you trust that they have done their homework. The technical sidekick now needs to look at the feature from the developers perspective, they need to sit down and dream up the idle way a developer should approach this (so it’s kind of part User Experience Imaginer as well). They look at it from the angle of setting goals for the engineering team to meet the marketing team half way on.

No more over complicated API that go nowhere and lastly no more tooling that makes you want to scream at the product(s) and you soon forget the benefits of the feature (I’m looking at you Deep Zoom, WCF and a whole heap more).

Having this equation also stops science projects spilling over online, where everyone is looking confused and thinking "oh must be for someone else as I so don’t need that feature at all" from occurring. It’s a balance struck much like rock paper scissors (each role trumps the other).

The Salvatore "Sal" Romano (ak Artist).

This person should have a portfolio of design that makes you dreamy eyed with envy. The point is this person is your polish to the spin you put out and it’s their job to figure out what looks good and what isn’t. Once you figure out what you want to build and how you want to market it, you need a person in the room who can manage your media / design agency vendors and with an attention to detail the goes beyond color preferences.

Most of Microsoft’s "viral videos" look cheesy, over worked, over bought and under delivered. The reason being is you rarely have someone in the room who thinks creatively. This person goes to art galleries because they want to see art or they like the Apple iPhone because of its Industrial Design characteristics and not because it has Angry birds.

This person keeps your presentation skills in check and through the guidance of the team will make sure you come off looking polished.

Look at World of Warcraft’s website; this is a amazingly well designed site for a game. Now look at other game websites, the difference is the experience. The point here is someone in the room is keeping a close eye on design decisions being made and ensuring the brand is putting best foot forward.

The same can be said for Apple vs. Microsoft. Apple have a centralized polished look to the way their make products online – Microsoft looks like someone figured out how to remake Geocities but for corporate reasons.

Just like in Mad Men, Sal is the person who knows good design when he sees it.

The Peggy Olsen (aka PR / Copywriter).

This can be an important but healthy addition to the team(s). If you are going to manage a product, make sure you have someone in the room who can write a sentence that does not look like my blog – full of spelling and grammar errors.

This person’s job is to make sure you do not screw up online and say stupid stuff – especially when dealing with your competitors. They also handle your press and announcements with keen focus on what needs to be said and when/how. They work closely with Art & Technical to ensure the message they position is correct and is not full of fluff / waffle that goes nowhere.

They also need to be edited as much as they can by the Don Draper’s & Roger Sterling’s to ensure that the message / copy they produce is not talking at the audience(s) but with them.

Recently Microsoft said Windows 8 and HTML5 in the same breathe which lead to a lot of questions around .NET’s future. Had a Peggy been in the room this would of not happened, as letting a VP go on stage like that solo is just showing off. You need to get that person on stage, do their message drops but also have an entire campaign of media ready to drop in behind it to underpin the messages and points you want made across the globe.

Steve Jobs gets on stage does his thing but the moment he drops announcements there is media everywhere to support it at the same time in parallel.

Having a good PR person working closely with press is important as well and they need to be devoted and focused to a product (not someone you bring in on/off again). They are also your lawyer in a room full of press as you let them figure out the ways to handle aggressive and passive journalists (News flash, sometimes Journalists are so lazy you can almost write the story for them whilst some are the ones you try as best you can to play a game of high stakes poker with).

In conclusion.

That is my thinking of how Product Management should work, it is not really one person it is a team of entities all working in a tight unit much like a game of rock paper scissors. You need to market a product to the masses but you also need to figure out what the masses need vs. want whilst at the same time coming up with features and ideas that they aren’t expecting.

There is no such thing as a separation between Inbound and Outbound marketing, its bulls**t. It is both directions at the same time and engineering need to listen up and listen well. Your jobs are to take the bright crazy dumbass ideas and figure out ways to make it happen, as you now need to reverse engineer the imagination it took to think up.

Windows 8 : Making new friends, Ratcheting Momentum and influencing anger.

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Scott Barnes

After just having a discussion with a journalist today, a question was put to me that I felt I should share some more information around – Why do you think the developers appear to be angry with Windows 8?

It is not that I think developers are angry about code name "Windows 8" being well HTML5/JavaScript friendly in fact it is probably one of those situations where you would easily go "great, not for me but hey who knows how things turn out down the road". It is also not the fact that Microsoft have come out and hinted strongly at the idea of dropping marketing support for .NET going forward in favor of HTML5/JavaScript cocktail of weirdness.

I think what’s happening is developers across the globe in what appears to be millions now (currently on Silverlight.net forums there’s a few threads ratcheting around 11million views – which is 11x the traffic per month that site gets) all basically releasing a lot of pent-up annoyance at the communication blackout – yet again.

I think this is a case of "the last straw" and it has been lurking for quite some time about Microsoft and a consistent amount of failings around corporate communication 101. To some this appears on the surface to be some idiot in PR being asleep at the helm again (keep in mind often Microsoft outsources its PR to companies like Waggener Edstrom) and so it could be a case of a room full of people pointing at one another for the "what do we say" moment(s). I highly doubt that, I’d wager this is an executive decision and its likely driven by the concept of ratcheting customer momentum for a final reveal in September.

Note: I recently had the VP of Corporate Communications for Microsoft follow me on Twitter post the Windows 8 Fallout(s)…. Why?

Creating a disruption in the market with the sole intended purpose of getting people around the world to talk more about you in mixed emotions isn’t a brilliant new tactic – it was done in the Windows 7 launch with the Jerry Seinfiled ads that Microsoft bet around $300million on. Realistically this strategy can often work (we’ve used this formula a few times with Silverlight in the early days) but at the same time it’s what I’d class as a high risk strategy given you could scare people too much.

This is of course speculation as at the end of the day the more Microsoft staffs I talk to internally about this the more I get the growing sense that majority of the staff internally are also in a complete blackout as well. Insiders within Microsoft are telling me that they are both concerned and frustrated at the lack of information coming from Team Sinofsky to the point where they are not interested in whether or not .NET lives or dies but how the heck they are going to clean up after this reveal occurs.

I probed further and asked what kind of convincing points are needed in order to illustrate to the presidential overlords that having 11million+ views all seeing the words ".NET" and "Dead" is probably not a smart play here and short of announcing .NET 5.0 at //BUILD/ you’re digging a very large hole. The response that I later got forwarded to me was one from an executive that stated that unless they see major accounts being withdrawn all that really is happening is interest and group of developers getting emotional about it all.

Yeah, my first impression was "what a jackass" but having sat in similar meetings like this when Adobe AIR was first considered a major threat to Microsoft, all I can say is that’s exactly how the company thinks at a higher level. It’s a numbers game, and hearing stories like "my friend just told me they are moving away because of this" small stories don’t add up to situations like the US Govt calling Microsoft to say "Yeah, the whole .NET confusion thing is something we aren’t happy with and so we’ll be moving to Java/Oracle – thanks bye" moments aren’t flowing just yet or likely to.Measuring account losses due to an event is somewhat hard as deep at your core you can see that the potential is definitely there despite the deafening "the sky is falling!!" emotions running high.

The reality is its unlikely to create havoc for at least a few years should they come out and say tomorrow ".NET is dead, thx" as looking at Windows XP & Internet Explorer 6 its obvious that Microsoft technology is very hard to kill of even with official announcements.

What is the TAX then? What is the one thing you can beat Microsoft around the head with that will send some sense to Redmond?

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Developers, Developers, Developers is that answer.

Microsoft are losing a battle in replenishing the .NET developer share, it’s alleged that for every 1x .NET developer that departs the Microsoft ecosystem there should be at least 2x more to fill their shoes. The reality it’s the opposite – allegedly.

Ok, so we highlight the depletion of the ranks and state "..if you continue scare the kids with the comms blackout that number will increase! And so you be able to control the depletion rates.."

That will not work either, as HTML5 and JavaScript is a nice big juicy cake to sink ones potential teeth into. As the big bet is that if you can convince the world’s developer base – the ones NOT using .NET today – to jump onboard with the new Windows8 concoction called Metro meets HTML5/JavaScript across all screens. Bing! (No pun intended) you just got a completely new market share you did not have yesterday.

That is the bet at the moment, win hearts and minds with a unified platform the world has agreed upon across all languages – HTML and JavaScript. Sadly, the .NET developer base is being used right now as collateral damage and is considered acceptable loses.

This is dangerous game being played and all the years I’ve been involved in Microsoft this is by far the most interesting and distracting time for the company. In under 48hrs in my opinion Team-Steve managed to undermined and undo a total of three years work by the various people within the Silverlight teams so should the reveal in September be a case of "Look we were just kidding, here’s our roadmaps going forward.." it would still set Silverlight back quite a lot in terms of regaining what marketing momentum is left for the product.

The reality is Silverlight’s marketing & evangelism has been severely reduced from where it once was and the products are now in auto-pilot mode (aka "they are now matured" which is code word for being bored with it).

Evangelism efforts are going to have to dig deep post reveal on September and to be openly honest their record lately for influencing the influencers has been murky if not non-existent. It’s a contact sport Evangelism and I’ve noticed in the past 2-3 years more so that the steam it once had has diminished quite significantly (due to budget cut-backs and basically VP of DPE – Walid Abu-Hadba driving the entire practice into the ground).

It is not that people are angry, they are confused and disappointed.

Let’s hope this bet pays of Team-Steve as the guy before you made a big bet as well. The last we heard of him now is that he’s trying to make it into the music scene so one hopes you’ve learnt to play guitar Mr Sinofsky

Understanding “Why would Microsoft do that?”

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Scott Barnes

There is a consistent theme that I often see when I have been invited into conversation(s) regarding Windows 8 and the whole HTML5 saga. The main undercurrent is "Why would they do that?" and it is a perfectly valid question that often gets lost in the whole opinion / news pieces that are floating around.

Understand the metrics first.

Inside Microsoft you are really goaled around a metric that involves the words "market share" in that somewhere along those lines your entire reason for drawing a pay cheque distills down to that. You have to help Microsoft grow its market share across all battlefields and there are multiple battlefields in play.

Battles are what are happening in today’s software industry. It is quite competitive and cutthroat in many places and often mercy is for the weak. Companies on both sides often play by the rules governing ethics but often more so than ever it is not the case under the covers or behind closed doors. There are often many tactics at work that the audience(s) and customer(s) do not always see.

For instance, when Silverlight/Expression was heating up in the early days the battle between Adobe and Microsoft was quite intense (I myself was caught up in it quit easily). You’d have situations where Adobe would threaten to shut down a conference if Microsoft Staff showed or you’d have Adobe specifically target Microsoft showcase wins the next year and spend large amounts of $$ to win the customers back to create the perception that these customers had buyer’s remorse.

Apple, Google, IBM and Oracle all suffer from the same somewhat software industry driven guerrilla warfare style tactics. It is a competitive sport and staff within get quite emotional and aggressive at times about it – like a thunder dome of super geeks.

Tactical approaches and competitive aggression is what fuels Microsoft often. It has also to answer the question you have around "Why would they do that" simply put; it is about building an army primarily.

Understand the Tactical Programs

You have programs in play like BizSpark – an idea to give the software away for free in order to seed start-ups into adopting the Microsoft technology stack. It is the old heroin addiction formula at work, in that the first hits free but the second and third will cost you. Ensure an addiction takes place then the monetization will follow.

HTML5 + Windows 8 are no different. The prospect of enticing never before heard of developer hordes – also known as the Alternatives to .NET development into adopting Windows 8 platform(s) via the HTML5/JavaScript route is worth the risk to Microsoft. It is about socketing these peeps in early, get them acclimatized to the Microsoft technology stack and from there you can bleed the monetization models outwards into channels that you can declare internal victory over.

Understand the Compete motions

The thing though is this playbook or this strategy is in no way different to the days when .NET was first created and it is again a rinse/repeat formula being played out.

The motivation is growth around developer share (that is an obvious objective around winning) the other objectives are also around competing head to head with Google & Apple. Google is the main focus though, this company is taking bodies from Microsoft staff lines often and if you were to look at the past two years around who’s left the .NET development teams as well as the Internet Explorer teams for Google it’s almost alarming.

Google don’t need to compete with Microsoft, they just need to re-hire their staff and I often giggle about this as I once wrote an internal memo regarding Adobe compete whereby I said "We should make a $300k a year offer to their entire evangelism staff to work for us, we say here’s $300k now go sit in the park and enjoy life for the next 2 years as it would be cheaper than what we spending on compete for Adobe".

Google are kind of doing that in many ways.

Understanding the gullibility.

Google are also provoking Microsoft into adopting their tactics and more importantly forcing the companies hand into moving Internet Explorer closer towards a HTML5 Future(s) than before. For instance they punk’d Microsoft into fixing the JavaScript engine within Internet Explorer because they had the company convinced that this was their biggest fear around how Microsoft could beat Google. Microsoft took the bait and the funny part is the person who worked on that engine is now working at Google today.

Google played Microsoft and it is this small random pocket of competitive insights that often go unnoticed in the industry. These small little gems of "hah that was funny" all add up to the situation we see before us today around why Windows 8 looks and is likely to act in the way it is.

There is no real strategy here, just tactical competitive reactions played out that do not often give pause to the massive impacts it places on the hordes of developers who wear the Microsoft logo on their blogs / resumes etc. with pride.

Microsoft is doing a terrible job at corporate communication(s) and the most frustrating part of all is that it is the actual fans of the brand that are noticing the most.

That is probably a small glimpse at how a competitive situation can motive product lines into making snap decisions the way they have been in the past five years. The reality is you the customer out there who use the technology actually play somewhat a smaller role than you do think around feature selection and roadmaps for product designs.

It’s often a competitive influence that drives the most decisions and sure compete leads to innovation right and that’s something we should all embrace – except if the tax is instability.

Summary.

For a deeper insight into this topic around “Why” Listen to a podcast I did list week titled “Windows 8 Round Table” via TalkingShop DownUnder.

http://www.talkingshopdownunder.com/2011/06/episode-58-windows-8-round-table.html

Steve Ballmer leaving will make no difference.

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Scott Barnes

The villagers are unhappy; they are blaming the poison / toxic well (share price) of their beloved Microsoft land on the wicked warlock – Steve Ballmer. He has to go, and when he is gone, all in the land of Microsoft will return to the happy times, life as we know it will be better and food will of course be much tastier.

Firstly, Clue the f*ck up.

If Steve Ballmer came into his office today and said "dang it, you are all right, I have to go. I hereby resign, bye!" nothing and I repeat nothing would change. The problems inside Microsoft are definitely leadership issues but at the same time, the source of the pollution / toxic situation is well within the leadership areas.

Think of Microsoft product teams as clans within a larger empire. All clan leaders are thirsty for power (most anyway) and depending on the moon cycles any one of them can take over the other clan’s turf as it really comes down to individual success and less about how that clan leader made his/her clan successful. If you do well in XYZ Company, you will in turn be moved into a position that you can continue your success in – point and case, Scott Guthrie (CVP and likely Bill Gates replacement) is now in charge of Windows Azure.

Knifing the Steve Ballmer baby as one person put it, is really only going to create a power vacuum. The moment he gets thrown off campus all major players within the clans will jockey for the next seats of power and you whilst there will likely be an immediate freeze on all roles (until the caretaker / new person gets his/her business cards etc. printed) there will still be some internal knife fighting taking place.

The reality is that Microsoft’s "toxic" issues are not a result of one rogue Executive it is more to do with a whole layer of General Managers, Directors and Presenditial masses. Even guys like Scott Guthrie who is undoubtly liked by all is one you definitely don’t want to piss off in the internal Microsoft circles (I’ve seen him rain his Gu-lighting, he can be a hardass just as much as the rest of them – to loosely quote something to the words of “Last guy who f*ked with me I stuck his head in my fridge” ..funny point is we all then looked for his fridge…dunno why).

The culture within allows bullying, in fact it’s very "lord of the flies" at times when there is little or no direction and/or worse when there is failure upon failure occurring (as you end up with "hey I can fix that, get of my way…followed by more…"hey I can fix that fix, get out of my way") moments.

Steve Ballmer needs to go but not for a sweeping reform but more to do with starting the engine that may one day lead to a sweeping reform. If Steve Ballmer is fired from the Microsoft tomorrow it won’t making a licking difference as you really need to shed people like Lisa Brummel (VP of HR) first. HR inside Microsoft are as useful as a blind/mute/deaf lawyer in a murder case. The crime has been committed but you best study your own defense and the legalities within as HR will just nod, smile and wonder what all the talk is about as they have the role guides, global citizenship programs that go nowhere and do nothing to attend to that or think up new ways to screw staff over with ideas like "we should remove all towels from carpark shower rooms…that will save us $$$!!"

Microsoft have lost many quality staff the last 2 years, some of the folks that have left I know whilst others I only know of. I sit back and think, "Wow, that guy and that guy oh and that girl…they will be very hard to replace…" so far I have not seen a replacement for them, I have seen a lot of new knuckleheads try to fill their shoes but ultimately have come unstuck.

DevDiv Silverlight team for example is in a weird place and furthermore that product is going backwards not forwards. Silverlight 5 has some interesting new features but the engineering component to Silverlight was never a problem, it just like WPF suffers from the same surrounding issues – lack of interest.

End is simple. Get rid of Steve Ballmer but face the reality it will not make that huge of a difference to both the share price and culture within. All it will do is create a vacuum of chaos initially and may adjust the culture slightly at best.
90,000+ employees do not take their marching orders from a single man. It goes through layers of bureaucratic passive aggressive stakeholders first.

The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Scott Barnes

The phrase “authentically digital” makes me want to barf rainbow pixels. This was a quote pulled from a Windows Phone 7 reviewer when he first got a hold of the said phone. At first you could arguably rail against the concept of what Authentically Digital means and simply lock it into the yet another marketing fluff to jazz a situation in an unnecessary way.

I did, until I sat back and thought about it more.

Issues Presented.

Metro in itself has its own design language attached, they cite a bunch of commandments that the overall experience is to respect and adhere that is to say, someone has actually sat down and thought the concept through (rare inside Microsoft UX). I like what the story is pitching and I agree in most parts with the laws of Metro that is to say, I am partially onboard but not completely.

I’m on board with what Metro could be, but am not excited about where it’s at right now. I state this as I think the future around software is going through what the fashion industry has done for generations – a cultural rebirth / reboot.

Looking back at Retro not metro.

Looking at the past, back in the late 90′s the world was filled with bold flat looking user interfaces that made use of a limited color palette given the said video capabilities back then wasn’t exactly the greatest on earth. EGA was all the rage and we were seeing hints of VGA whilst hating the idea that CGA was our first real cut at graphics.

EGA eventually faded out and we found ourselves in the VGA world (color TV vs. black n white if you will), life was grand and with 32bit color vs. 16bit color wars coming to a conclusion the worlds creative space moved forward leaps and bounds. Photoshop users found themselves creating some seriously wicked UI, stuff that made you at the time thank the UI gods for plug-ins like alien ware etc as they gave birth to what I now call the glow/bevel revolution in user interface design.

Chrome inside software started to take on an interesting approach, I actually think you could probably trace its origins of birth in terms of creative new waves back to products like Winamp & Windows Media player skins. The idea that you could take a few assets and feed them into mainstream products like this and in turn create this experience on the desktop that wasn’t a typical application was interesting (not to mention Macromedia Director’s influence here either).

I think we all simply got on a user interface sugar induced high, we effectively went through our awkward 80′s fashion stage, where crazy weird looking outfits / music etc was pretty much served up to the world to gorge on. This feast of weird UI has probably started to wind down to thanks to the evolution of web applications, more importantly what they in turn taught us slowly.

Web taught the desktop how to design.

The first lesson we have learnt about design in user interface from the web is simple – less is more. Apple knocks this out of the park extremely well and I’d argue Apple wasn’t its creator, the Web 2.0 crowd as they use to be know was. The Web 2.0 crowd found ways to simply keep the UI basic to the point and yet visually engaging but with minimalist views in mind. It worked, and continues to work to this day – even on Apple.com

Companies like Microsoft have seen this approach to designing user interface and came to a fairly swift rationale that if one were to create a platform for developers & designers to work in a fashion much like the web, well desktop applications themselves could take on an entirely new approach.

History lesson is over.

I now look at Metro thinking back on the past evolution and can’t but help think that we’re going back to a reboot of EGA world, in that we are looking for an alternative to design in order to attract / differentiate from the past. Innovation is a scarce commodity in today’s software business, so we in turn are looking at ways to re-energize our thinking around software design but in a way that doesn’t create a cognitive overload – be radical, be daring but don’t be disruptive to process/task.

Inside Microsoft what I can presume, the ECG group found a way to hijack existing patterns in terms of user recognition and make use of modern signage found inside bus station, railways, elevator marshal areas etc and declared this to be the way out of the excess UI scourge.

I like it, I like this source of inspiration but my first instinct was simple – I hope your main source of success isn’t the reliance on typography, especially in this 7second attention economy of today. Sure enough, there it is, the reliance in Windows phone 7. Large typography taking over areas of where chrome used to live in order to fix what chrome once did. The removal of color / boundary textures in order to create large empty space filled with 70px+ Typography with half-seen half-hidden typography is what Microsoft’s vision of tomorrow looks like.

Metro isn’t Wp7, Metro is Microsoft Future Vision.

My immediate reaction to seeing the phone (before the public did) back inside Microsoft was "are you guys high, this is not what we should be doing, we are close but keep at it, you’re nearly there! don’t rush this!". This reaction was the equivalent of me looking at a Category 5 Tornado, demanding it turn around and seek another town to smash to bits – brave, forward thinking but foolish.

This phone has to ship, its already had two code resets, get it done, fix it later is pretty much the realistic vision behind Windows Phone 7 – NOT – Metro.

Disbelief?

Take a look at what the Industry Innovation Group has produced via a company called Oh, Hello. In this vision of tomorrow’s software (2019 to be exact) you’ll see a strong reliance on the metro laws of design.

The Principles of Metro vs. Microsoft Future Vision.

In order to start a conversation around Metro in the near future, one has to identify with the level of thinking associated with its creation. Below is the principles of metro – more to the point, these are the design objectives and creative brief if you will on what one should approach metro with.

Clean, Light, Open, Fast

Feels Fast and Responsive
Focus on Primary Tasks
Do a Lot with Very Little
Fierce Reduction of Unnecessary Elements
Delightful Use of Whitespace
Full Bleed Canvas

You could essentially distill these points down to one word – minimalist. Take a minimalist approach to your user interface and the rewards are simple – sense of responsiveness in user interface, reliance on less information (which in turn increases decision response in the end user) and a reduction in creative noise (distracting elements that add no value other than it was cool at the time).

In Figure 1, we I’d strongly argue you could adhere to these principles. This image is from the Microsoft Sustainability video, but inside it you’ve got a situation which respects the concept of Metro as after all given the wide open brief here under one principle you could argue either side of this.

Personally, I find the UI in question approachable. It makes use of a minimalist approach, provides the end user with a central point of focus. Chrome is in place, but its not intrusive and isn’t over bearing. Reliance on typography is there, but at the same time it approaches in a manner that befits the task at hand.

Microsoft’s vision of this principle comes out via the phone user interface above (Figure 2). I’m not convinced here that this I the right approach to minimalism. I state this, as the iconography within the UI is inconsistent – some are contained others are just glyphs indicating state?. The containment within the actual message isn’t as clear in terms of spacing – it feels as if the user interface is willing to sacrifice content in order to project who the message is from (Frank Miller). The subject itself has a lower visual priority along with the attachment within – more to the point, the attachment has no apparent containment line in place to highlight the message has an attachment?

Microsoft’s original vision of device’s future has a different look to where Windows Phone 7 today. Yet I’d state that the original vision is more in line with the principles than actual Windows Phone 7. It initially has struck a balance between the objectives provided.

The iconography is consistent and contained, typography is balanced and invites the users attention on important specifics – What happened, where and oh by the way more below… and lastly it makes use of visuals such as the photo of the said person. The UI also leverages the power of peripheral vision to give the user a sense of spatial awareness in that, its subtle but takes on the look and feel of an “airport” scenario.

Is this the best UI for a device today? No, but it’s approach is more in tune with the first principle then arguably the current Windows Phone 7’s approach which is reliance of fierce amounts of whitespace, reduction in iconography to the point where they clearly have a secondary reliance and lastly emphasis on parts of the UI which I’d argue as having the lowest importance (i.e. the screen before would of indicated who the message is from, now I’m more focused on what the message is about!).

Celebrate Typography

Type is Beautiful, Not Just Legible
Clear, Straightforward Information Design
Uncompromising Sensitivity to Weight, Balance and Scale

I love a good font as the next designer. I hoard these like my icons, in fact It’s a disease and if you’re a font lover a must see video is Helvetica. That being said, there is a balance between text and imagery, this balance is one struck often daily in a variety of mediums – mainly advertising.

Imagery will grab your attention first as it taps into a primitive component within your brain, the part that works without your realizing its working. The reason being is your brain often is in auto-pilot, constantly scanning for patterns in your every day environment. It’s programmed to identify with three primative checks, fear, food and sex. Imagery can tap into these striaght away, as if you have an image of an attractive person looking down at a beverage you can’t but help first think “that’ person’s cute (attractive bias) and what are they looking at? oh its food!…” All this happens despite there being text on the said image prior to your brain actually taking time to analyse the said image. To put it bluntly, we do judge a book by its cover with extrem amount of prejudice. We are shallow, we do prefer to view attractive people over ugly unless we are conveying a fear focused point “If you smoke, your teeth will turn into this guys – eewwww” (Notice why anti-cigarette companies don’t use attractive people?)

Back to the point at hand, celebrating typography. The flaw in this beast despite my passion for fonts, is that given we are living in a 7 second attention economy (we scan faster than we have before) reliance on typography can be a slippery slope.

In Figure 6, a typical futuristic newspaper that has multi-touch (oh but I dream), you’ll notice the various levels of usage of typography (no secret to news papers today). The headings on purpose approach the user with both different font types, font weight, uppercase vs lowercase and for those of you out there really paying attention, at times different kerning / spacing.

The point being, the objective is that typography is in actuality processed first via your brain as a glyph, a pattern to decode. You’ve all seen that link online somewhere where the wrod is jumbled in a way that you first are able to read but then straight away identify the spelling / order of the siad words. The fact I just did it then along with poor grammar / spelling within this blog, indicates you agree to that point. You are forgiving majority of the time towards this as given you’ve established a base understanding of the english language and combine that with your attention span being so fast paced – you are more focused on absorbing the information than picking apart how it got to you.

Typography can work in favor of this, but it comes at a price between balancing imagery / glyphs with words.

The above image (Figure 7) is an example of Metro in the wild. Typography here is in not to bad of a shape, except for a few things. The first being the “Pictures” text is making use of a large amount of the canvas, to the point where the background image and heading are probably duking it out for your attention. The second part of this is the part that irritates me the most, in that the size of the secondary heading with the list items is quite close in terms of scale. Aside from the font weight being a little bolder, there is no real sense of separation here compared to what it should or could be if one was to respect the principle of celebrating typography.

Is Segoe UI the vision of the only font allowed? I hope not. Is the font weight “light” and “regular” the only two weights attached to the UI? what relevance does the background hold to the area – pictures? ok, flimsy at best contextual relevance but in comparison to the Figure 3 above a subtle usage of watermarks etc. to tap into your peripheral vision would provide you more basis to grapple onto – pattern wise that is. Take these opinions and combine the reality that there is no sense of containment and I’m just not convinced this is in tune with the principle. It’s like the designers of metro on windows phone 7 took 5% of the objectives and just ran with it.

Comparisons between Figure7 and Figure8, the contrast in usage of typography is different but yet both using the same one and only font – Segoe UI. The introduction of color helps you separate the elements within the user interface, the difference in scale is obvious along with weight and transforms (uppercase / lowercase). Almost 80% of this User Interface is typography driven yet the difference in both is what I hope to be obvious.

Don’t despair, it’s not all dark and gloom for the Windows Phone 7 future. Figure 9 (Above) is probably one of the strongest hints of “yes!” moment for the siad phone I could find. Typography is used but add visual elements and approach the design of typography slightly differently and you may just have a stake in this principle. The downside is the choice of color, orange and light gray on white is ok for situations that have increased scale, but on a device where lighting can be hit/miss, probably need to approach this with more bolder colors. The picture in the background also creeps into your field of view over the text, especially in the far right panel.

Alive in motion

Feels Responsive and Alive
Creates a System
Gives Context to Improve Usability
Transition Between UI is as Important as the Design of the UI
Adds Dimension and Depth

I can’t really talk to these principles via text on a blog, but what I would say is that the Windows Phone attacks this relatively ok. I still think the FlipToBack transition is to tacky and the reality between how the screens transition in and out at times isn’t as attractive as for example the iPhone (ie I really dig how the iphone zooms the UI back and to the front?). The usage of kinetic scrolling is also one that gives you the sense of control, like there are some really well oiled ball bearings under the UI’s plane that if you flick it up, down, right or left the sense of velocity and friction is there.

If you zoom in and out of the UI, the sense that the UI will expand and contract in a fluid nature also gives you the element of discovery (Progressive disclosure) but can also give you a sense of less work attached.

Taking Figure 11 & Figure 12 (start and end) one could imagine a lot of possibilities here in terms of the transition were to work. The reality that Reptile Node expands out to give way to types of reptiles is hopefully obvious whilst at the same time the focus is on reptile is also in place (via a simple gradient / drop shadow to illustrate depth). Everything could snap together in under a second or maybe two but it’s something you approach with a degree of purpose driven direction. The direction is “keep your eye on what I’m about to change, but make note of these other areas I’m now introducing” – you have to move with the right speed, right transition effect and at the same time don’t distract to heavily in areas that aren’t important.

Content, Not Chrome

Delight through Content Instead of Decoration
Reduce Visuals that are Not Content
Content is the UI
Direct interaction with the Content

Chrome is important as content. I dare anyone to provide any hint of scientific data to highlight the negative effects of grouping in user interface design. Chrome can be over used, but at the same time it can be a life saver especially when the content becomes over bearing (most line of business applications today suffer from this).

Having chrome serves a purpose, that is to provide the end user a boundary of content within a larger canvas. An example is below

I could list more examples but because I’m taking advantage of Microsoft Sustainability video, I figure this would be sufficient examples of how chrome is able to breakup the user interface into contextual relevance. Chrome provides a boundary, the areas of control if you will in order to separate content into piles of semantic action(s). Specifically in Figure 15, the brown chrome is much like your dashboard on the car ie you’re main focus is the road ahead, that’s your content of focus but at the same time having access to other pieces of information can be vital to your successful outcome. Chrome also provides you access to actions in which you can carry out other principles of human interaction – e.g., adjustment of window placement and separation from within other areas offers the end user a chance of tucking the UI into an area for later resurrection (perspective memory).

Windows Phone 7 for example prefers to levearge the power of Typography and background imagery as its “chrome” of choice. I’m in stern disagreement with this as the phone itself projects what I can only describe as uncontained vast piles of emptiness and less on actual content. The biggest culprit of all for me is the actual Outlook client within the said phone.

The Outlook UI for me is like this itch I have to scratch, I want the messages to have subtle separation and lastly I want the typography to have a balance between “chrome” and “whitespace”.

Chrome can also not just be about the outer regions of a window/UI, it has to do with the internal components of the user interface – especially in the input areas. The above (Figure 17) is an example of Windows Phone 7 / Metro keyboard(s). At first glance they are simple, clean and open, but the part that captures my attention the most is the lack of chrome or more to the point separation. I say lack, as the purpose of chrome here would be to simulate tactile touch without actually giving you tactile touch. The keyboard to the right has ok height, but the width feels cramped and when I type on the said device It feels like I’m going to accidently hit the other keys (so I’m now more cautious as a result).

The above (Figure 18) offers the same concept but now with “chrome” if you will. Nice even spacing, solid use of principles of the Typography and clear defined separation in terms of actions below.

iPhone has found a way to also strike a balance between chrome and the previous stated principles. The thing that struck me the most about the two keyboards is not which is better, but more how the same problem was thought about differently. Firstly as you type an enlarged character shows – indicating you hit that character (reward), secondly the actual keys have a similar scale in terms of height/width proportions yet the key itself having a drop shadow (indicates depth) to me is more inviting to touch then a flat – (its like which do you prefer? a holographic keyboard or one with tactile touch, physical embodiment?). If you were to also combine both sound and vibration as the user types it can also help trick the end users sense into a comfortable input.

I digress from Chrome, but the point I’m making is chrome serves a purpose and don’t be quick to declare the principles of Metro as being the “yes!” moment as I’d argue the jury is still not able to formulate a definitive answer either way.

Authentically Digital

Design for the Form Factor
Don’t Try to be What It’s NOT
Be Direct

I can’t talk to this to much other than to say this isn’t a principle its more marketing fluff (the only one with a tenuous at best attachment to design principles would be “design for the form factor” meaning don’t try and scale down a desktop user interface into a device. Make the user interface react to the device not the other way around.

Summary

Metro is a concept, Microsoft has had a number of goes at this concept and I for one am not on board with its current incarnation inside the Windows Phone 7 device. I think the team have lost sight of the principles they themselves have put forward and given the Industry Innovation Group have painted the above picture as to what’s possible, it’s not like the company itself hasn’t a clue. There is a balance to be struck here between what Metro could be and is today. There are parts of Windows Phone 7 that are attractive and then there are parts where I feel it’s either been rushed or engineering overtook design in terms of reasons for what is going on the way it is (maybe the design team couldn’t be bothered arguing to have more time/money spent on propping up areas where it falls short).

People around the world will have mixed opinions about what metro is or isn’t and lastly what makes a good design vs what doesn’t. We each pass our own judgement on what is attractive and what isn’t that’s nothing new to you. What is new to you is the rationale that software design is taking a step back into the past in order to propel itself into the future. That is, the industry is rebooting itself again but this time the focus is on simplicity and by approaching metro with the Microsoft Future’s vision vs the Windows Phone 7 today, I have high hopes for this proposed design language.

If the future is taking Zune Desktop + Windows Phone 7 today and simply rinse / repeating, then all this will become is a design fad, one that really doesn’t offer much depth other than limited respite from the typical desktop / device UI we’ve become used to. If this is enough, then in reality all it takes is a newer design methodology to hit our computer screens and we’re off chasing the next evolution without consistency in our approach (we simply are just chasing shiny objects).

I’ve got a limited time on this earth and I’d like to live in a world where the future is about breaking down large amounts of unreadable / unattractive information into parts that propel our race forward and not stifle it into bureaucratic filled celebrations of mediocrity.

Apple as a company has kick started a design evolution, and say what you will about the brand but the iphone has dared everyone to simply approach things differently. Windows Phone team were paralyzed at times with a sense of “not good enough” when it came to releasing the vnext phone, it went through a number of UI and code resets to get it to the point it’s at now. It had everything to do with the iPhone, it had to dominate its market share again and it had to attract consumers in a more direct fashion. It may not have the entire world locked to the device, but it’s made a strong amount of interruption into what’s possible. It did not do this via the Metro design language, they simply made up their own internally (who knows what that really looks like under the covers).

Microsoft has responded and declared metro design as its alternative to the Apple culture, the question really now is can the company maintain the right amount of discipline required in order to respect the proposed principles.

I’d argue so far, they haven’t but I am hopeful of Windows 8.

Lead with design, engineer second.

Microsoft’s Behavioral Patterns.

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Scott Barnes

I’m often engaged in a variety of conversations regarding Microsoft, obviously because I’m opinionated about the company – more to the point, its almost become a niche thing I seem to tap into. In that, I could talk about Google or Adobe but often I get the “that’s your opinion” vibe. If I talk about Microsoft in the same way, i get the “Oh really?!!” interest vibe.

That’s often fueled allot of my soap boxing as i feed off that quite happily and its not that I want the 5sec of fame, its more that I feel I am adding an insight or value to a conversation around me, like I have this small pocket of information that enables someone beside me to unlock a pattern or compounding issue relating to Microsoft and its technology / culture. It’s hard to put into words, but in reality the more people I interact with the more I get this overwhelming sense of “yeah, you’re right, I couldn’t figure out how to say that but yes, that make sense now” moments.

Let me attempt to articulate the flaws I am seeing inside Microsoft as a brand that I personally have found reflected back at me via these conversations (you are feeding my addiction hehe).

Scarcity.

Often Microsoft when they launch a product alert the masses well in advance around what’s coming. They endeavor to flood the market as fast and aggressively as they can with the said product. It often gets to a point where they effectively buy there place in your memory through constant rinse/repeat approach to alerting you. If they don’t get you on the first pass, they’ll get you on the second or third etc. Its an old tactic and with the budgets that also get allocated to various teams that are enough to keep 5-6 startups a live for years, it often comes with a sketchy at best yield.

The problem with this tactic is we as consumers at times are great at ignoring this as we’ve spent a large amount of our adult lives watching this same formula repeat itself over and over. We often can predict its movements ahead of time and so when we see the pattern emerging its easy to then point out the flaws and faults (often allot of the tech journalist profit from this). Those who aren’t used to it see others doing this and go “wow, its like you’re able to see the future!!!” and so this in turn fuels the engine.

If you however, look across the skirmish lines to Apple or Google. They really often more than most, don’t do this. They are often associated with this sense of surprise effect and more to the point they give you this other sense that “while stocks last” or “you better hurry now and get it before others find out and no stock will be left” kind of moment(s) at launch / announcements.

Apple is by far the most effective in the way they announce “new”. Microsoft staff often see this and try a lot of the times to emulate that success but they do so in a way that’s inconsistent at times or often messy / half-done. Yet when ones do succeed (much like a group of tree’s all fighting for sunlight over one another, one will eventually emerge) the said success breeds more “see, it works” momentum and thus the cycle internally repeats itself.

Microsoft has this flaw, they tend to not comprehend that in order to win the masses over one needs to create the element of rarity, there’s no sense of prized ownership or differentiation in their approach. The only time I would argue this has come to the surface – hehe – is well with concepts like Microsoft Surface, XBOX and in many ways with Windows Phone 7 – although that funnily enough is a problem.

I digress, but with Windows Phone 7 I watched the launch with interest in that to me Microsoft was looking for ways to sell the vibe “while stocks last” and “get one now ahead of everyone else” momentum, and they almost had it but for some reason, it was a fizzle effect. They didn’t in a nutshell sustain that momentum, it was a sense or rarity and then it was gone just as fast as it came.

Commitment

If you’ve been a devoted customer for quite some time to Microsoft you’d be hard press to find the said customers to argue that Microsoft is always committed to one particular goal or idea. The reality is, it is often a company that abandons ideas faster at times than they were projected. It has to do with the culture within the company mostly which then spills over into the customer / product lines.

I often make remarks about Victory Emails and how they are so wrong for the company but I don’t articulate why. Here’s why.

Microsoft staff are like abused children in some parts, in that they seek affection / attention through what I would call “ACE” dropping. In that, abused children often do this as a copining mechanism to emulate affection or love given they have often had this part of their lives destroyed. What happens is the said child will wow everyone around them with the first ace up their sleeve and everyone suddenly goes “that’s amazing” and the said child then basks in the glow from this effect.

The effect however only lasts for so long and so they need to keep that momentum alive by dropping their second ACE and again, it happens again.. This pattern repeats itself for an average of 4-5 times at most before the said child starts making plans to abandon these sets of folks and seek out new people to wow / win over.

Inside Microsoft, this is a surprisingly consistent pattern I observed. You’d see these rising stars come in fast and hard, only to fizzle out around the first year maybe second year and then just as fast as they came they’ve left. Think of this like watching a bunch of fireworks come and go and then quietness follows. Its in the quiet times that you peel away the covers and start seeing staff ping / pong around teams via internal transfers and commitment calibrations etc.

There is never really a consistent holding pattern and when you do find that consistency its usually owned by a personality who’s found a way to just sustain the calm effect (under the radar) or is a complete jackass and dominates through power-politics – never really is there that spark of “Wow” in that seat.

If staff can’t commit to a set idea or goal over a large body of time, then how on earth can a product ever remain consistent and focused? If Microsoft were to announce tomorrow that staff transfers were to be put on hold for minimum 5 years – I’d wager you’d see a high exit rate of staff for one and secondly you’d see an entirely different marketing and engineering effort from within the company itself.

The reason being is the rising star’s can’t keep doing their 4 ACE pony tricks to wooo over others and as such you’d likely see a steady / calm growth from within around planning and focus. Victory emails themselves would have less of an effect as “congrats, you did a great job, but, you can either get a promotion or a pat on the back, either way you’re not moving out of this team buddy, sorry!” moments.

Internally until this is solved, Microsoft will always come across externally as a company that lacks depth in terms of commitment.

Clarity

I’m not going to beat on this drum to loudly, but I’d wager i’d be hard pressed to find a single person outside the company that would argue strongly that the company seems to have clear definitive goals around what they do (ie taps into commitment). The problem an internal one yes, but externally they don’t have a sense of clustering or grouping in that their pattern is inconsistent and often hard to parse.

If I were to put a bunch of XX’s on screen right now like this:

XX XX XX XX

You would typically see the X’s in groups of two? In that the clarity around that pattern is simple. It’s information if you will is broken into a consistent but clearly defined pattern.

If I were to take that same concept and apply this formatting to it:

XXxXxXXxx

The pattern isn’t as clear and for those of you paying close attention, you may also notice I added an extra “X” without others probably realizing it. The point here is simple, Microsoft’s approach to product positioning and placement isn’t consistent and as a result you have the secondary effect vs.. the first. You can’t get behind the information as you’re too busy in your own mind, trying to separate the X’s into clusters that enable you to digest the information more closely.

This is how I would illustrate the massive amounts of bad information / inconsistent look of Microsoft’s entire approach to everything it does. There’s not really one person or person(s) being the gatekeepers of the said pattern in terms of how the company saturates the market with new information. It just seems to be a case of inconsistent X’s and at times some other letters mixed in.

Too many Options

I mentioned earlier that Victory Emails are a dangerous beast within. The other reason to this reason is the inherit concept of what success is or isn’t within the company. Popularity wins first, yield comes second is probably a pattern i’d argue as being “yup, that’s about right”

If you were to look up research around how humans deal with options, you’d probably settle on the concept “less is more”. On one hand we humans are attracted to options, we all actively want more options than we can handle but in reality we rarely ever agree with the options and furthermore in a consumer driven situation – we often more than most don’t buy more as a result.

In that most research I’ve read on the subject highlights that if customers were given 100 items to choose from, the said customers who were initially attracted would be quite high. If the said situation was reduced to 30 items, the attraction would be much lower than the 100 but the purchasing or acquisition behavior would be actually significantly higher than the initial 100

Inside Microsoft I often would notice quantitative analysis was often used as a metric of success “congrats, you’re popular!” where as if you were to peel away the word success here, and study the qualitative analysis of the said “success” you’d find the yield to me much lower.

An example:

“All the major journalists are talking about a products, they reach millions on our behalf, success is ours!”

In reality

“All the major journalists who reach majority of the same customers talked about our products but not in a really in-depth way and often more than none had a negative remark about us or two”

Inside Microsoft you have a PRIME score which keeps track of positive/negative PR, but the point here is that whilst yes you had the journalists from around the worlds full attention – the reality is what does that actually mean? you reached a larger customer base then say your random blog post? but what did that reach mean? and more to the point what effects has that reach on the purchasing or adoption behavior of your customers. Furthermore, how can you then map this against other products in the market and where is the overlaps occurring and lastly who’s really competing for attention – external companies or other teams internally?

Inside the company there’s really no conductor or movie style director who’s keeping a steady handle on how information flows in and out of the company. It often comes in large volumes and is spread far and wide with often no real data to support success or failure – more perception.

Summary.

The point to this post isn’t to beat the crap out of the brand – yet again – it’s more to clarify the patterns I personally see in the way the company approaches us, the consumer. It also taps into conversations I’ve had over the years (employee and ex-employee) with how the products and customers are bonding. The company itself has a large amount of problems that often just don’t seem to finding any hint of remorse or success in stemming the tide of failure.

What I am seeing is an exodus of some no-name on the blogsphere staff shifting over to Google or other. If you look at these staff leaving as isolated “oh, darn xyz left” then it’s not so bad. If you start adding them up and back tracking what they did for the company and more specifically the products they managed or ran, you start to see – well I do anyway – a pattern emerging of “oh wow, this is quite bad as the successors are def not as capable and what does that mean for that xyz work they were doing?”

Staff are important and the end final point I have to say is the above is simply a dump of patterns I see and how the on flow from the centre out is what is causing the most pain for the company. The products themselves will have a bumpy lifespan over time and sure the community surrounding the products will also share the same amount of turbulence. The actual cause of all these bumps though start with the above, these are the engines if you will producing the chaos.

Hey Scott, WPF isn’t dead he just said so..

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Scott Barnes

I was forwarded a blog post today from a .NET dev – Juan M. Medina. It was a great insight into the cause/effects and now response to some of my blog posts. It however left me a little frustrated mainly around the main issue of the declaration of WPF is dead being lost in translation.

To clarify, if I may.

Juan walked up to Tim Heuer, Pete Brown and Scott Guthrie and asked them flat out whether or not WPF is dying – is that ex-Employee smoking crack or what? is the underlying point (but Juan is much politer). The response is as expected, in that the staff will usually work hard to show one and all a hint at the technology roadmap, partner success and internal bets being placed on the said product. It’s perfectly fine for them to do this as should either one of these guys deviate in the slightest well it’s both political and career suicide to even think about declaring the said UX platform dormant / aka dead.

It’s not about whether or not they are actively working on the said product(s), putting 3x engineers on a dormant product is still considered progress. The total number of engineers and features being worked on isn’t enough to declare a product alive. It needs more collective effort around it to really drive it home.

Google for example allocated some serious engineering effort behind Google Wave, its dead today. It had a roadmap, it had engineers, it had Google saying similar commitment speeches and it had a descent amount of initial launch public exposure. It’s dead, what happened?

The answer is similar to where I see WPF today, it’s got a bunch of engineers high-fiving one another around what’s coming up next, how cool it is and lastly what people have done with it only when asked.

WPF has no marketing. I’ve covered this in an early post, but that’s the initial point of the "WPF is Dead" and why it’s got both a small amount of engineers as well as maybe one or two warm bodies actively evangelizing and marketing it at best – that’s assuming if you count Rob Relyea and Pete Brown as its entire marketing force.

In not having a collective Evangelism, Marketing and Engineering team working alongside one another, it pretty much becomes this Google Wave like science project. In that you get a list of random features that most people may look at and go "Well I guess, the other guys in the WPF community wanted that, not for me though" that really don’t sync up to the overall collective practical usage today for the said technology. You basically have 200+ engineers all working on features that probably have zero to no impact worldwide with the collective majority who actively use the said technology (who says I’m right or wrong on that?)

Thus, it’s a corpse.

In order to be successful with a product like WPF, you need to really sit down and analyze the overall feature matrix and think about how it’s being used, where its being used, what the maturity levels are for developers, what features are fun vs. boring, what features are needed for xyz verticals, what features are needed in order to prepare for the next 2 releases and so on..

For example, you look at a feature and you apply something like the following to it:

Is this feature completely new to the industry (Deep Zoom, Pivot Viewer etc).
Does this feature have full tooling support?
Does this feature have learning materials ready at launch?
Is this feature fully documented?
Has this feature had breaking changes prior to RTM?
Does this feature require Level 300+ developer skill maturity in order to comprehend.
Does this feature rely on other features?
Is this feature a market differentiator?
Is this feature a highlight feature (ie RTM talking point)
What partners have used this feature and specifically in which demo / examples
How often will this feature be used compared to the others?
etc..

You ask a plethora of these questions as you need to market, manage and evangelize this feature as if it were the most important piece of the said product. It doesn’t have to be, but it gets your entire product positioned in a way that reduces friction to all that need to comprehend and ask what value the said feature is about to provide?

Features aren’t just bullet points in a blog post.

It’s not about saying "I just committed 200+ engineers and I now have the following shopping list of items ready for you" it’s more about how the said shopping list fixes or addresses real world scenarios – frame the problem then show how the feature solved it.

Collectively all features need some kind of airplay, but you also need to filter out the easy from the hard and focus on spending effort via Evangelism , Blog Posts, Tutorial Videos (level 100, 200, 300 etc) and so on reducing the friction associated with the hard ones. Use the easy features simple ice breakers only, but double down on the hard ones as much as possible.

It doesn’t stop there, you also need to go through and clean up the internet as much as possible around some of the beta / breaking changes for any features that you had prior to release as sadly, transparency comes at a price – confusion. Legacy blog posts need updating as they’ve shifted from just being a moment on an RSS Horizon to being part of your collective documentation world-wide. You need to track some of this and get ahead of it as much as possible.

Last but most important of all, you need to take all this effort and market the crap out of it. You need to spend close to 2 years minimum rinse and repeating the value of WPF over and over. It needs to be broadcasted and when you think you are done, start again.

Coco Cola is a brand the world knows at first sight, they don’t just sit back and go "Well coke is pretty much well known now, it’s a mature brand! – job well done all!" – instead you are constantly reminded of the beverage and how refreshing it’s going to make you feel whenever you get thirsty. They do this as when the time comes and when you face a fridge inside a supermarket, you make a decision within 7 seconds on whether or not you believe them. The constant reminding is done for a reason as its about ensuring coke is your default choice.

Microsoft have yet to figure this out across all of its products. Its why there is a huge contrast between Microsoft and Adobe, Apple and even Google. Microsoft floods the market with "look at me" quick, fast, dirty and uncalculated marketing principles that often change every fiscal.

The others don’t, they typically keep a steady course and iterate on failure and break success. Rinse & Repeat. Apple are the most calculated of all, everything they do is done in a matter that has quality bands tightly controlled.

This week alone you’ve seen two separate fumbles at basic product positioning and press releases from an executive through to a simple press release (Bing 3D maps deprecation announcement was a mess).

To wrap this corpse up..

My end point is this, walking up to an Executive inside Microsoft and flat out asking "Is that product dead or what?" is not going to get you an accurate answer. Save your question, instead ask

What is the marketing strategy for WPF?,
What’s the feature catalogue look like beyond what I’ve already seen so far?
How often do you plan to ship?
Is there Evangelists in my subsidiary that are going to help me market and seed a community around this product?
Who are the community leads at Microsoft who can help me with further questions for this product?
How do I train developers & designers to prepare for WPF?
How does WPF and Silverlight work with one another with the new features?
What can I use to convince my work to adopt this technology?
How does WPF work with my vertical (finance, health, mining etc)
How does the case study you told me about relate to the following features?
etc

You keep hammering away at the hard questions around the future sustainability of WPF beyond a few random stats that really don’t give you an accurate picture – eg.. 200+ engineers on WPF/SL? what does that mean? is that 100 engineers on WPF and 100 engineers on Silverlight? do they even need 200? is 200 enough..should there be more? what’s that mean?

Is WPF dead? yeah it is do you know why? because someone forgot to tell us all it’s not.

The rise and fall of Microsoft’s UX platform – Part 3

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Scott Barnes

It looks bad, I mean it really just looks bad. The President of Server & Tools in PDC just came out and pretty much implied that the race between HTML5 vs. Silverlight internally is over. The winner by way of Presidential nominee is HTML5.

It’s easy to assume that maybe Mary Jo got it wrong, that maybe she took some journalistic spin to the overall story and tricked BobMu into saying things he didn’t want to (it’s what Journalists tend to do sometimes). Think again, Mary Jo doesn’t play that game and its exactly why she gets these types of interviews in Microsoft, so why start now?

It’s also easy to assume that maybe BobMu is just some empty jar head executive who says a few buzz words here and there? someone who typically isn’t informed of the inner workings of one out of many products that fall within his portfolio? sorry, that’s not true either. Each quarter when I was in the team, we’d have what we call "RTB’s" – Reviews of the Business. It’s that point in time where the team would put together a PowerPoint deck that covered everything from roadmaps through to metrics associated with the said product. BobMu was not only informed, he’d make decisions that we’d all react to post such meeting. He was informed and unless he was heavily medicated, he meant what he said.

What’s the story then?

It’s not like I didn’t warn all about this turn of events a few weeks ago, (read part one of this post). The story isn’t whether Silverlight is or isn’t dead. I don’t think Microsoft could even kill off Silverlight to make way for HTML5 just yet (HTML5 is simply still a science project in the market). I think what we are really seeing is a company as large as Microsoft in chaos.

You’ve got a President doing PR 101 mistakes, You’ve got a marketing team that double down on a single product instead of their entire UX Platform portfolio, you’ve got the Internet Explorer team writing their own messaging that confuses the masses against existing messaging. You’ve got an IE9 demo at PDC that smells, tastes and looks like a previous one in MIX07 only without the word Silverlight in it? You’ve got Silverlight not making an appearance at PDC which isn’t a bad thing given MIX is really the party for Silverlight, but given market conditions – YOU SHOW UP.

Bottom line is this, the entire Server & Tools business within Microsoft is in dire need of marketing reform. The strategy coming out of Redmond is chaotic at best, the design and develop discussion has obviously changed within the belly of the beast. The problem is, they’ve kind of forgotten to inform the masses of this and we’re only just starting to see glimpses of the inner truth now – and its frightening the kids especially when its Halloween time!

I did want to dedicate this post to how Microsoft has shut down the entire "designer engagement" strategy across all divisions, but clearly this is simply a symptom of what we’re now seeing unfold online.

Microsoft is by all outward appearance shutting down its vision of the circa 2007 UX Platform, it’s now winding it back to secondary citizen in favor of the new shiny object, HTML5?

I for one reject our new HTML5 overlords.

The problem with moving Silverlight & WPF back to the end of the visibility line, is that nobody really has sat down and asked existing rich client developers what they think of this new vision? it’s a forced entry into the market mixed with a whole bunch of messaging from the Internet Explorer team that’s labeled "Trust us, we have this covered" seal of quality assurance.

The one team in which has breed so much distrust in Microsoft. It’s probably the biggest cancer within Microsoft and is the main reason why the Consent Decree exists.

The cold hard reality is that most developers actually probably don’t want to go back to Circa 2005 development with extras (i.e. JavaScript and HTML suck). The entire HTML5 strategy is basically a mess on its own as you’ve got Browser catch-up’s that still need to be done.

You’ve got issues around browser owners looking into ways of forking the HTML5 concept to suite their own agendas? You’ve got tooling coming out slowly and half baked? You’ve got a mixed reaction of what HTML5 actually means? You’ve got anxiety over whether or not JavaScript and HTML can scale? you’ve got millions of devices today that just can’t load HTML5? You’ve got at least a 2-5 year latency effect world wide of enterprise even considering HTML5 in its current form … the list just goes on.

It’s one thing to get onto a soap box and declare a true x-platform strategy like HTML5 the future? it’s one thing to say "open standards or bust" as being the mission statement of the world’s future software ecosystem.

Someone just point out where the strategy exists for moving people both willingly and unwillingly across the desktop/plug-in divide over to this new world, because if Microsoft is running this show, we’re all basically f#$%ked – I say this as right now, they couldn’t organize a virgin in a brothel to get laid (as they would be too busy fighting over which girl was the prettiest).

Silverlight vs WPF vs HTML5?

Pete Brown last week released a blog post around the future of WPF which talked about successes and hints at the future of the platform. Pete did something extremely hard in making this post come together, he went internally and asked a simple question "Where is this bus heading?" and that’s just before PDC2010 as well – big hat goes off to Pete for pulling this together, as many have tried and failed that little mission.

It’s still not enough though! – now before you grab your pitchforks and declare me a jaded hateful ex-WPF/Silverlight team member, hear me out.

The reason I say it’s not enough is that we just heard 200+ engineers are working on Silverlight/WPF and looking at the new additions to WPF, i can’t but help wonder how thinly the team are spread. There is a lot of surface area to cover inside WPF, the biggest of which is around performance and getting line of business grade features onto the table. The WPF team are reacting to the data they have and unless there is radical changes since October last year in the way they get this data, it’s still a ways off (the product usage data etc inside Microsoft is simply disconnected and a mess, features are skewed between what looks fun vs politics etc).

It’s not enough, there needs to be a consolidated marketing strategy around the product(s), there needs to be an Evangelism rhythm that maps out how this drum beat gets played out worldwide, i.e. its one thing to announce how you intend to build something – its entirely another to actually get that message to every developer you possibly can.

It also needs to connect back to Silverlight. It needs to fit in with how developers can navigate the ye olde "It Depends" response from Microsoft. The guidance Pete used was old, I know as it was something we crafted back in July last year – "Use Silverlight until you hit a wall, then go WPF" was pretty much the summary we came up with (even then I remember thinking, that’s just bullshit but what else can we say? WPF is dead? )

WPF also needs to connect back into HTML5? so how does the new IE9 overlords and WPF play in the same sandpit together? at what point do you separate the two? Windows 8 team have ideas on this, but I’m pretty much betting that the HTML5 story will get more air play in that pool of brilliance.

Summary.

Lots has been said in the past month, bottom line is this. The technology is currently a big software buffet, we have loads of options and different portions on the table to pick from. We need informative views more so than ever now, given the emerging mobility vs. desktop discussion and more importantly how all these pieces fit together.

Microsoft lacks the marketing muscle right now to answer these questions, they simply just don’t have the maturity needed to lead this vision forward. You’ve got pretty much majority of the executive branch abandoning ship and the competitors they used to just sweep the legs out from under are basically starting to get their act together.

Adobe for one has its act together finally, I’ve watched this company for years fumble around in the dark around this entire discussion. At MAX 2010, they not only connected it together but they did so in a way that is slow, simple and has the appearance of saturation + ubiquity.

Microsoft’s shows up and starts waving its hands in the air about Internet Explorer 9, Azure and how Silverlight is now winding down – not to mention zero WPF discussion (except for Rob Relyea – owner of WPF Team – picking up the Developer Platform & Evangelism divisions dropped ball and doing a PDC session on WPF).

Bob Muglia needs to really take a hard look at his organization tree and start putting together a plan of reform. This isn’t a technology problem anymore, it’s a marketing one pure and simple.

As for Silverlight Marketing Team getting ahead of the PDC2010 fall out? – “Out of Office” summarizes it all.

WPF has no Product Manager.

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Scott Barnes

WPF has a lot of potential going for it, it’s one of these products that you absolutely hate upfront when you first start on its learning curve but over time you grow to love it dearly as it unleashes a lot of creative potential within you early.

There’s been a lot of talk recently around its futures, namely by myself but also in various forums, discussion lists and so on. It’s both healthy but at the same time it’s not being heard by the right people internally within Microsoft.

WPF has a few problems to sort out, firstly there is what I call the convincing phase, in that getting people to initial embrace the latest version of .NET 4.0 is a challenge unto itself – which has next to no marketing attached. The second challenge, is the ask that folks get behind the learning curve / investment of adopting WPF instead of Silverlight for desktop based solutions. It’s a challenge because Silverlight Out of Browser has confused a little on which is best for what and where. The last but most important challenge of all is the learning curve attached to WPF, as it’s somewhat a very chaotic and noisy Google search to undertake.

Why adopt WPF?

In 2007, I was an Evangelist for Microsoft via Australia for this question. I’d probably give you some prescribed marketing spin that went something like this:

“WPF is for ultimate experience, Silverlight is for great experiences and lastly AJAX/HTML is for good experiences”

I’d then throw up a slide and show you the three pillars of Microsoft UX Platform and how we as a company are investing big into the futures of developer & designer productivity. Its obvious that was a lie, and apologies to any who bought it – as even I bought it.

The reality behind why adopt WPF is simple, you have full control over your user experience on a Windows based PC (both Windows XP and Vista/Windows7). You have more ubiquity (70% of Windows machines today – have at least .NET 3.5 installed) than Silverlight and in many ways typically have more support around API’s then Silverlight. You have a much more engaging interop story (ie access to the quasi 3D now in WPF but should you want to go big, you can again via interop do more). You have now a descent amount of download size as well, roughly ~40mb give or take to deploy with.

I could list a whole bunch more reasons, but the end summary is that WPF has a lot of positives attached to it today than people typically think or know?

If it’s so good, Why is WPF dying then?

I’ve thought about this question a lot since leaving the WPF/Silverlight teams. I’ve blogged about the fact I think its dead, I’ve explained many times over the reasons why there is internal politics getting in the way but ultimately what it comes back to is simply a Product Management problem. As a former Product Manager of this product, I simply wasn’t doing my job for WPF. I ignored it, it was easy to do so as Silverlight was the main star in this theater.

WPF isn’t being evangelized anymore, it has zero marketing and more importantly the development team within Microsoft are tasked with all of this as well as partner hand holding and actually development of the said product. Scott Guthrie can throw a random 200+ engineers are working on it all he likes, but ask anyone internally if I’m lying about who does what and where, and I will guarantee you the bulk of the work falls into the hands of the WPF Engineering team to do it all solo.

Point and case, Evernote this week blogged about how they abandoned WPF and went C++ instead, citing performance reasons etc. as the reason(s) why. Fair enough, but what struck me is odd was that none of the usual suspects where jumping ahead of this PR issue, in that typically you see something like this you quickly put some spin on it, reassure the masses with your said messaging framework and rinse/repeat until you get downright annoying about how good WPF is still.

Didn’t happen.

Still not convinced? take Windows 7 Launch. I remember seeing an internal memo about how the said campaign was going to work and more importantly how $300million+ in marketing budget was going to be spent convincing the world that Windows 7 is a good bet this time round. “I’m a PC” was born.

I also remember sitting in a team meeting discussing what story we would pitch for WPF/Silverlight around Windows 7? we soon learnt that Windows 7 had the same developer story as it did Windows Vista. This then resulted in the team deciding that since there was nothing new or shiny to talk about, we’d just leave it be.

This frustrated a colleague and myself. The reason being is that who said Windows Vista + WPF got traction? who said we still couldn’t use the same goals as we did back then! I mean our team even re-branded .NET logo to fit into a more up to date branding strategy.

We simply didn’t go out there and market .NET 4.0 or 3.5 along with Windows 7. We should have been hitting the usual channels, promoting how with WPF you can get blah blah potential out the door. We should have been investing heavily into adoption channels, ensuring the future of tomorrows .NET developer was embracing Windows as well as the potential for cross-platform, cross-device and cross-browser technologies.

Learn once today, Use many tomorrow – or a cheesy tag line like that should have been conjured.

Instead Silverlight is and now Wp7 are being pushed as the sole future(s) of Microsoft. It’s no wonder the Windows team aren’t on board with DevDiv, as when you take a step back and look at what they have to leverage from the developer community – then you are left with a solution that basically works in all other platforms as well as their own? the only chance you get of keeping that genie in the bottle is to bake features that are Windows Specific into place – yet this won’t bode well as that level of adjustment to an existing agnostic product won’t happen as it simply deposits large amount(s) of hate debt into the bank from developers world wide (embrace and extend is a known tactic of Microsoft that breeds distrust and disagreement)

WPF needs Product Management 101

PDC has finally got one session in its talk agenda that is focused on WPF. It took the guy in charge of WPF’s development teams to step up and do Microsoft Developer/Platform Evangelism Team(s) (DPE) job. Rob is an awesome guy and I have a deep amount of respect for his work, it just seems downright disappointing that he’s got to focus on a session talk instead of sitting in a bubble thinking up better ways to develop WPF’s future(s).

MIX and TechEd for the last 2 years has had little next to none (I can think of anyway) WPF discussions happening, essentially Microsoft is putting WPF on its ignore list.

What needs to happen is Product Management 101, there needs to be an actual WPF Product Manager dedicated to its future. At the moment that role fits under the Silverlight Team at best, and is thinly spread between Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and any if not all Rich Platform compete issues ranging from Adobe centric through to the threat of HTML5. There is no one person really owning this problem, just a few directors appearing to.

Product Management is about protecting the brand, it’s about sitting down with partners and figuring out what features worked vs what didn’t. It’s about thinking about how your competitors are doing xyz and then coming up with ways to differentiate from them. It’s about working with community leads (corporate and street evangelists) ensuring they understand your vision for the future of the said product. It’s about crafting a marketing channel (web page, blog etc) that echoes your reasons for why it exists, where its heading and what successes and failures its had. It’s about investing in learning material on features that are rated the hardest and letting developers discover the ones on their own that are less harder (it plays into the psychology of learning, if you learn something that is a little hard but tad easy, your confidence levels rise). It’s about ensuring others are inspired by your products vision and compete with one another to create beautiful experiences that go beyond your initial baseline of expectations.

None of this exists today. It all sits in the hands of the engineering team who are doing all this and actually coding at the same time.

Scott Guthrie said there were 200+ engineers working on WPF & Silverlight. How many are working on WPF and more importantly how many people are marketing WPF & .NET 4.0 today? If its more than one, then tell me, what have they done lately?

As I seem to be the most vocal guy on the planet right now about WPF and nobody has challenged me head-on in proving me wrong?

I’ve often thought about what I’d say if someone actually asked me to move back to Microsoft Corp and take on this role? my first answer would be – I want to sit next to the development teams and I want a ring fenced budget that I spend solely on WPF, give me those and I’ll do the job again, only this time I’ll execute more precisely.

Ruby On Rails has less to work with and they’ve kicked Microsoft’s butt so badly now, that its now considered a competitive threat! do more with less I guess?

Windows Phone 7 – A phone without individuality and coming soon music?

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Scott Barnes

Microsoft has announced the Windows Phone 7 officially, it’s the coming out party for this late to the market device. I’m on record saying that I think it’s a “meh” release, in that its rushed and not cleanly delivered as it could of been had there more time, but given SteveB underestimated the true potential the iPhone had on the market – here we are, today, new phone.

The phone itself technically has a lot of potential in terms of what i can and can’t do, I for one am going to buy one because this is the space I dwell in. As for consumers, i don’t see it being a rush to buy thing given a few issues with the phone that i’ve noticed already.

The first issue is lack of individuality, as i scope out the various hardware manufacturers idea of what their Windows Phone 7 world is going to look like there is clearly a lack of remarkable differentiation between the said devices. In that so far, there’s not a lot of personality to the phones other than some minor slide-outs (some opt for physical keyboards etc) but overall it seems very lack luster in range.

Having not a lot of sizzle outside the operating system to me is an early sign of caution, as phones are really part function but also equally part form (it’s a fashion item as well as a worker focused technology).

The most important aspect that I felt the phone has definitely come up short on is the lack of Zune subscription world wide. I’ve got a Zune subscription in the US via my US Credit Card, so for me I’ve been leeching off this cheap approach to solving my music issues. I pay approx $15 USD a month or so, and I get all the music i want for free via my Zune Device and Desktop (It’s DRM and expires in 3 months unless i reconnect to the Zune Marketplace with a content sync).

Not having this subscription channel straight out of the box basically makes the phone part-brain dead as for me this and XBOX-lite games are probably the two focal points of differentiators for “reasons to ditch Andriod/iPhone” for average consumer.

Why is Zune Music subscription important to Windows Phone 7

It firstly seeds an entrenched market, iTunes currently holds supremacy over our music purchases online, and having to pay $2 per song basically creates a polarizing effect on individuals as on one hand buying the album is cheaper than a physical one in stores but on the other hand why buy when you can pirate?

Piracy is an issue that has a lot of tentacles but one component of piracy is lack of access to a credit card. I mean, take an average 15 year old kid who no doubt is into music to get them through puberty blues. These kids don’t have access to credit cards all the time, so the moment they need to buy a song or two, its a case of bugging parents for the said funds. I’d wager most parents give the kid the brush off and so they are left to pirating off their friends etc for the said songs.

Zune subscription however allows parents to buy a monthly/yearly subscription model. This in turn can then be a gift based approach which in turn can also mean the whole house not just the one child can access the said subscription.

It gets better, having this one child gain access to a library of music is one thing but then freely being able to send the said music selection to other friends is also a potential body punch to piracy amongst this said target audience. It also creates a natural evangelism for Zune subscription and if marketed and managed well it basically can put some much needed pressure on Apple iTunes etc, point is this story can be told in a number of different ways all pointing towards an interesting differentiation between Apple and Microsoft.

Combine the subscription model with Microsoft Points (ie XBOX Live etc) and you also have an abstracted currency exchange that can mask users from emotive based purchasing (who knows how much 923pts translates to in real dollar terms off the top of their heads!)

Zune needs to go global first time out, it sends a strong message about being feature complete for version 1. Failing to do so and via the usual trickle in late to the party progressive disclosure marketing – aka Microsoft Marketing 101 – simply fails to gain awareness as much as it could or should.

The industry way.

The Barnes / Mad Men way.

The Don Drapper (aka Director)

The Roger Sterling (aka Community / Client Liaison)

The Lane Pryce / Paul Kinsey (aka Domain Experts).

The Salvatore "Sal" Romano (ak Artist).

The Peggy Olsen (aka PR / Copywriter).

In conclusion.

Related Posts:

Related Posts:

Understand the metrics first.

Understand the Tactical Programs

Understand the Compete motions

Understanding the gullibility.

Summary.

Related Posts:

Related Posts:

Issues Presented.

Looking back at Retro not metro.

Web taught the desktop how to design.

History lesson is over.

Metro isn’t Wp7, Metro is Microsoft Future Vision.

The Principles of Metro vs. Microsoft Future Vision.

Clean, Light, Open, Fast

Celebrate Typography

Alive in motion

Content, Not Chrome

Authentically Digital

Summary

Related Posts:

Scarcity.

Commitment

Clarity

Too many Options

Summary.

Related Posts:

To clarify, if I may.

Thus, it’s a corpse.

Features aren’t just bullet points in a blog post.

To wrap this corpse up..

Related Posts:

What’s the story then?

I for one reject our new HTML5 overlords.

Silverlight vs WPF vs HTML5?

Summary.

Related Posts:

Why adopt WPF?

If it’s so good, Why is WPF dying then?

WPF needs Product Management 101

Related Posts:

Why is Zune Music subscription important to Windows Phone 7

Related Posts: