Demonstration marketing

by on June 2, 2006

Faux Windows Vista demonstration

Seeing the Chinese protests that were on campus a few weeks ago back when the Chinese president visited must have given the Windows Vista marketing team some ideas. As we drove onto campus yesterday there was tons of Windows Vista signage and pods of fake protests.

Now, these things weren't done to get a world-wide audience. There's a full-court press on to get employees to load the latest builds of Windows Vista and Office 12.

This is one of Microsoft's secret weapons. Well, not so secret.

By getting employees to try our betas (we call it "eating the dogfood") the teams find a lot of bugs that even Chris Pirillo can't find.

For instance, I loaded the latest build yesterday and my sound card still doesn't work. So, this morning I'm entering a bug about that. It pisses me off. But better that it pisses me off than gets out into the real world and pisses off a customer.

Anyway, nice to see the Windows Vista marketing machine is starting to spin up. They also had balloons in the campus fountains and I hear that there were some Windows Vista Talking Rain cans in some of the refrigerators on campus. I want one! I bet those will show up on eBay.

Regarding Windows Vista, other than my sound card not working, it's really taking shape fast. The performance is noticeably better than three weeks ago and things are starting to really look great. Jeff was showing me his new dual-screen Vista and told me he can't use XP anymore cause he's less productive on XP than he is on Vista. I can see why. I love the new Sidebar and search and, while there's still a lot of rough spots, it really feels a lot better than XP. At least for me.

We've also been doing quite a few sessions with other companies on campus lately on both Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation and some of the apps that I've been seeing are quite magical. Can't wait to talk about those. Is anyone working on WPF or Vista-specific apps that we don't know about? We'd like to talk with you if you are.

Windows Vista balloon

  • Rick
    When you mention the latest build of something, are you allowed to say what the build is? If so, that would sure add value to what you're saying and put it in context. In this case, presumably you're talking about a post-Beta 2 54xx build.

    On sound cards, it's a funny thing: Maybe it's just me, but I've never seen Vista install a sound card driver with the OS itself, only post-install via Windows Update. I'm not sure why they're not bundling more with the product, but maybe that's just the case now. I assume yours was not one available via WU, however.
  • dmad
    Your shareholder dollars at work! Is this really the best use of the shareholder's money? Paying MS employees to "protest" and produce signage? Why not apply that money to.. oh, I dunno... say fixing your sound card bug?
  • Matt
    dmad, the point is that they're trying to increase dogfood rates internally, so they can discover the problems. I doubt that these people here, the ones with the signs, are really the bug triage types as it is...
  • I talked to a few of these "protesters." None of them were MS Employees - many actually worked for a marketing firm.

    Hey, Robert: Here's a photo of the Windows Vista can: http://mcblah.com/photos/mcblah_photos/picture7... There are plenty in the Cafeteria right now if you want a few.
  • dmad: they were temporary workers. Not actual Microsoft employees. They worked one morning.

    The key is to get everyone to install Vista and give feedback to the product teams about what still needs to be fixed. There's 20,000 people who work in the Puget Sound area, so this is an important feedback loop.
  • Carlos
    Robert, here is a small challenge for you. Take that bug log and make it transparent. Show us all the steps in how that bug gets assigned, triaged, investigated and ultimately closed in either a positive or negative way.
  • Carlos: I'd love to do that. But showing how the sausage is made isn't Microsoft's strong suit.
  • dmad
    @5 Hey, that's great. Where they some of the temps that had to be laid off recently because MS was overbudget? Hey, its your shareholder's money. Do with it what you want. If I were a shareholder I'd question why MS had to pay temporary employess to encourage MS FTE's to install betas of ITS OWN SOFTWARE. Is Vista really that compelling that even your own employess have to be advertised to in order to install it? That speaks volumes about how GREAT it is right there. That would make a great headline:

    "Microsoft has to hire temporary workers to encouage its own employees to install next version of OS"

    Again, Brilliant!
  • Goebbels
    When you pay an outside marketing firm to perform an extremely cheezy gimmack in the hopes of getting your own employees to use your own products, there is a significant problem.

    They don't want to eat the dog food.

    It is a sign you are feeding them shit.

    And even then, most dogs are willing to eat shit.
  • Ironically... I just installed Ubuntu 6.06 last weekend... So far, everything I need to do can be done with Ubuntu.

    I'd love to switch to Vista, but the cost is prohibitive for me.
  • Joel
    - (we call it "eating the dogfood") - Very appropriate way of putting it. I would love to test if it means eventual free version of software:)
  • Why can't this be my job???
  • Matt
    You mention the importance of bug finding and beta testing, yet there seems to be no process for the public (which I assume is a larger audience of random testers than MS employees) to report bugs in the office beta.

    The closest I could find is a US Product Support phone number, which isn't exactly helpful.
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