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July 26, 2005Microsoft Embedded Weblog asks if Corporate Blogs are Valuable
Microsoft employees are asking themselves and their customers’ questions about the affects of blogs. Mike Hall’s Embedded Weblog asks his customers several questions about feedback.
1. Why do you read blogs, and more specifically, why do you read Microsoft blogs ?
2. Has your impression of Microsoft as a company changed from reading blogs and viewing MSDN Channel 9 or the video podcasts from MEDC/TechEd content ?
3. Should we (Microsoft bloggers) translate the content we produce on the blog into technical white papers or support knowledge base articles rather than posting to the blog ?
4. Have you seen Microsoft make product design decisions based on feedback in the community/blogs ?
5. How about bug fixes, have you seen any bug fixes, or power toys created directly from your community/blog feedback ?
Comments include:
Ian Dixon said “My impression has changed, at least you can get to see the human side of the company, and teams that don't blog seem to be not listening (hello Windows Media Player team!)�
Mihailik said, “4. Have you seen? Personally I have not. But I read about such cases.�
Sarah Blow said, “2. My impression of Microsoft changed a little from reading blogs and viewing the channel 9 podcasts. However it is constantly shadowed by lack of developer support for CE and hotfixes that break other parts of the windows platform! So I do still wonder what Microsoft do in terms of software testing!!!� and “4. I haven't seen any decisions or product design decisions based on feedback which is a shame.
5. Microsoft need to listen to their developers more! Please fix the bugs in Windows CE!!!! I have informed you of one and it still hasn't been fixed. Win CE with CDDB crashes after 4.5 days under certain conditions when the CEDB is in use!!! This isn't to say that Microsoft are terrible, just that they can improve by doing a few small things:
Test thoroughly
Listen to where the developers need support
Fix bugs that the developers identify
Give feedback on progress�
Gursharan said, “5. The best example to this is the bug in the CeFileWiz that was brought up on the blog and was then corrected. Am i right?�
Jeff Horton said “2. I was just thinking about this, my opinion has changed for the better. I enjoy seeing that the people working at ms are passionate about what they do and enjoy the company. It has even made me think about applying.�
Sean Chase said, “4. Absolutely. E&C for C# is a great example. 5. Yes, ASP.NET 2.0 breaking change to having a PageBase class defined and working with controls created automatically in a hidden partial class.�
Michael Hoskins said, “1.Seven out of ten times, it's from a Google search. The remainder, linked from other blogs. That should show how relevant most of the information is.
4. Nothing wrong with a corporate blog, as long as it's not used to disseminate misinformation, though that pretty much applies to any form of communication.
So the short answer is: useful, yes, but it's still more noise (though you can't fault the medium for that).�
Posted by johncass at July 26, 2005 10:54 PM
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