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his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. "
...Paging
Gared to talk about Microsoft's Customer Centric Approach!
Well, keeping in mind that "customer-centric approach" is just one more entry in a sea of completely meaningless corp-speak buzzwords, yeah - Microsoft has a customer-centric approach. But lets face it, aside from a few restaurants out there, where the chef/owner says "I cook my food, my way, and if the customers don't like it they can get the hell out," every company has a customer-centric approach. Microsoft's problem is just that they have no idea who their customers are or what they want. These are the guys who released Windows 8 just in time to lead the PC market to a 14% decline in year-over-year sales. They're also the same people who keep trying to "simplify the customer experience" by linking everything together into one massive account, formerly the Windows Live ID, now the Microsoft Account. The problem is, well, there's a lot of problems with that. They didn't start out with a one-login system, because they weren't allowed to require compulsory usage of Microsoft email addresses to use Microsoft services, and now they're trying to marry Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) with XBL accounts, Skype accounts, MSN accounts, Health Vault accounts, old MSN gaming accounts, Games for Windows Live accounts all together, and having to deal with the fact that half of the accounts didn't require people to use a Microsoft account.
Also, Microsoft is way too big, and they have too many customers with too much diversity. It was OK until they started combining divisions together when they decided that Windows 8 and Office 2013 were going to be online integrated services with social media blending. It used to be that the Windows division could devote 85 - 95% of their effort toward their corporate and enterprise customers, and just throw a little bit of effort into making sure the average computer user could figure out the interface; and the same was true of Office. But, for one reason or another, they got away from that with their latest offerings, and now all of a sudden people who've been brilliant at figuring out what features IBM wants to see in their workstation OS are having to try to figure out how to keep Joe Blow happy, and just failing miserably. Then you add in the fact that Windows 8 is meant to bridge the gap between desktop PCs and tablet devices, and you've got one giant cluster fuck of an impending disaster. What serious computer programmer would honestly think that the one feature that would really seal the deal for Office to be
the productivity suite was if you could add animations and sound to Excel, so that when you cut data from one area and paste it into another, you get a cool animation and a "fwoosh" like a jet flying the data from one cell to another? But sure enough, that, and having the option to save documents from Office directly to a SkyDrive account, are the kind of features that we got out of this cluster fuck marriage of consumer and enterprise development.
Then too, there's the fact that Microsoft trying to figure out what their customers want out of software is like the criminally insane leading the terminally stupid. Microsoft used to use focus groups and research firms to determine what the majority of their customers, for each specific division, really wanted to see in the next version of the software. They would come up with a list of wants, rank them on what was most requested, weigh the list against the technical difficulty and the amount of innovation that would be necessary, and head into the development cycle - and of course, once in development there'd be all kinds of feature creep and redesign needs and inevitably, Intel would come out with some major new technology that would require a reworking of the architecture; but in the end, they'd come out with a solid project (leaving aside Windows Me and Windows Vista). This time, it's obvious that they didn't do that. This time they've wound up with a hodgepodge of wants and wishes that make it look like they just put a poll up on Facebook and threw everything they could into the software without even bothering to filter out troll responses.
