A couple of points of information just connected for me whilst over on the Gaping Void blog …
Gaping Void’s Hugh and Microsoft’s Scoble back-and-forth a fair bit on Hugh’s blog. Hugh holds forth on the hughtrain, and the ways, means and attitudes for listening to the customer, creativity and innovation in this interconnected environment.
Hugh said recently, on Windows 2000 and Microsoft
Windows 2000
In an earlier post, I had the thought:
Maybe Microsofts’ main competitor isn’t Apple. Maybe it’s M.I.T.
Microsoft’s Robert Scoble responded in the comments:
Our real competition? Windows 2000.
…If we don’t make better products no one will upgrade. Windows 2000 will have won.
Well, I agree that nobody will upgrade without a better product, and I also that believe true competition comes from within the company, not from outside it. But basically, I disagree with Robert’s point about Windows 2000.
Robert, 2000 was five years ago. There were only a handful of blogs, the World Trade Center was still standing, Enron was the pride of Houston and people were still buying stocks in dotcoms.
Even if you remove chronology from the equation, Windows 2000 is a known quantity.
Known quantities belong to the past, not the future (and no, there is no present)
Scoble (The Economist’s Chief Humanising Officer for Microsoft) is building a considerable reputation for being open, listening well, and playing back to Microsoft the conversations going on amongst its customers.
He’s also been lauded (rightly, imo) for congratulating Firefox for its rapid success … I think he cited approximately 25 million downloads in about 10 weeks.
Today in his keynote address at the Northern Voices blogging conference Marc Canter (I believe) asked Robert a question about whether Microsoft would have come out with IE 7.0 had it not been for Firefox.
Robert stopped for a second, chuckled sheepishly and said (if i remember correctly) …. “Probably not” … and then demurred graciously to Marc by continuing …”if it weren’t for you and the others posting so many great suggestions to the team’s wiki”.
A nice semi-tangential reflection, but what I noticed was the “probably not” in the context of Firefox.
What are the backwards-looking odds that without such a clear and significant improvement from Firefox (not to mention some of the other great alternative browsers out there), Microsoft would have happily continued on deflecting and not really listening to its customers who, after all, have been complaining long and loud for some time about the inadequacies of IE 6.0 ?
My guess is that they would have - maybe - gotten around to it on their own time, notwithstanding their growing reputation (is it just really slick but maybe ultimately unsubstantive PR is the question that comes to mind) for listening to and working with their customers.