I wanted to share a little humour from the MSFT MVP Summit. Most of the summit is NDA material (i.e. I signed one or more pieces of paper saying I wouldn’t Disclose the information gained in the NDA sessions under legal penalty) but the Executive sessions which in general I find almost a complete waste of time are not only not NDA, but they bring the press in… So this is something I can and will share
First… Ray Ozzy executive speech… I don’t recall it, I woke up in my own drool on the floor with a slamming headache. Boring doesn’t begin to describe it and if I ever hear about Sharepoint and Groove again it will be too soon. Oh wait, it kept getting brought up in Steve’s session as well because of MVPs asking about it. Ugh.
General comment… Steve Ballmer was amazing as always, if you ever have a chance to see him speak, do it. He blows Tony Robbins out of the water. Hopefully Ray will never have to follow Steve, I feel bad if he ever does.
Second… Steve said Vista is a work in progress. I like his frank and brutal honesty. My personal comment on Vista… For some people it works great, for some people it doesn’t work great. For all of you who says it works great, don’t think the people who say it doesn’t work great for them are idiots, they may actually know what they are talking about. For all of you who says it doesn’t work great, don’t think the people who say it does work great for them are idiots, they may actually know what they are talking about… See where I am coming from? Me… I have different opinions on any given day based on what I am doing and have done in the last day. Overall I can take it or leave it. I am an OS agnostic for the most part. Whatever works is my motto. I won’t think you are an idiot for not using the OS I choose to use. I will think you are an idiot if you rant about me not using the OS you use.
Third… Steve said MSFT was a solid third in the internet search business. Ask Jeeves may have an issue with that but I agree. Steve mentioned they were working to aquire Yahoo and then did something funny… He asked how many people use Live Search… A smattering of folks raised their hands. He then asked how many people used Yahoo… And I don’t know what he was expecting the answer to be but me being a technical person and seeing what technical people use on a regular basis, was not surprised to see that it appeared not a single person raised their hand. I mean seriously, I looked across a room of about 2000 people and there was dead silence except some twittering (by which I mean laughing, not whatever else has highjacked that term) and no raised hands. Steve then said, ok let’s try that again… who uses Yahoo?? Same response… He cracks a little joke about offering $31 a share for it and then he paces on the stage for a few seconds and just sort of looked around and then slowllllllllyyyyy, finalllllllllllyyyyy asked the question everyone was waiting to put their hands up for… Who uses Google? There was a rousing cheer and hands up everywhere. So then a comment from me here…. you ask yourself, how do the results of that room change if the Yahoo purchase goes through… answer… it doesn’t. But I know a lot of non-technical people who use Yahoo exclusively and actually dislike Google so it isn’t the techies MSFT is going after by buying Yahoo, it is everyone else which is, in all honesty, the larger audience.
Fourth… Steve said something that I don’t think anyone at MSFT was expecting. It shocked me into coughing up part of my drink. I didn’t think it was a great idea but I expect it will be utilized… And all of my MSFT friends pay attention… Some random MVP whose name I refuse to recall said that he sent an email to a Microsoft Employee and…. shame…. didn’t get a response… Steve said it made him angry that the guy didn’t get a response and told the whole group… If you ever email anyone at MSFT and they don’t respond, forward the email to me. I’ll bet if we do that a couple of times the responses will come a lot faster and easier…
My thoughts on that, if you really want to piss someone off, send the email you sent to them to their bosses bosses bosses boss. You ping a CEO with an email about an unreturned email and if there is any action on that it will likely be someone coming down really hard on someone else and that just isn’t going to endear you to anyone… If you already have a combative relationship with the party in question, hey go for it. I did it once several years ago, I thought the Exchange Dev team was being particularly obtuse about not fixing a serious issue and I sent Steve an email with the special MVP header on it and sure enough, a short time later Exchange Dev was fixing the issue. It went into Exchange 2003 SP2 and was the changes made to DSACCESS for getting DSACCESS to try and give user’s a GC that was a DC in their own domain. Its not a full proof fix but it is night and day better than what was there.
Anyway, if you want to read the Steve Ballmer session, you can find it here –> http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/steve/2008/04-17MVP.mspx
I would love to post a video link but I don’t see one on the MSFT site.
