March 2007 - Posts
Man there's been a buzz around transparency lately...
I honestly don't have any insight into some grand plan at Microsoft about blogging and transparency. I can only point to my own personal experieces, and I have a timely example:
Last week a member of my team posted to the Windows Home Server Team blog a post about the statistics of the bug reports and feature requests we have received. A reporter saw this post and decided it was worth sensationalizing. The reality, as anyone who has built software knows, is that the numbers in the blog post are meaningless outside of the development team.
Chris (the PM on my team who wrote the post) probably should have know that the stats and numbers would likely be mis-understood and mis-represented by someone. But he didn't. He just thought the numbers showed an interesting aspect of “sausage making” and was justifiably proud of the team for the progress being made. So, in the spirit of transparency, he blogged about it.
And the article was written and posted as a result. The first real negative PR that Windows Home Server has gotten so far.
So what happened within MS as a result?
Was Chris discliplined? Did we pull the blog entry? Did we decide to change our stance on transparency?
No, No, and No.
Instead, in our team meeting yesterday I took about 10 minutes to tell the team the following:
- About every year or so, someone posts information about bug stats and a Microsoft product. Scary stories are written by the press and excited discussion ensues. And someone gets reminded that it's generally a bad idea to talk about detailed bug statistics in public forums. We're Microsoft and reporters will jump at a chance to sensationalize a topic.
- We have a spirt of transparency with our product. And even though we should be bummed that someone wrote an unjustified and negative article, we should not, and will not, change our stance. We will continue to be as open and forthcoming via our blogs, forums, and support tools as we can be. The benefits that come from being transparent far outweigh the risks.
- This will not be the last negative thing written about our product. When they come, make sure you look for any valid feedback contained therein, but don't panic or let the experience be negative.
While I don't have any insight into any (real or imagined) “Microsoft Master Plan for Transparency or the lack thereof” I can say with utter confidence that my product team is committed to transparency and we are unafraid of anyone telling us to be less transparent. We'll make mistakes and we'll deal with the publicity consequences if they arise. That's actually part of being transparent!
If you are new to Windows Home Server and want more insight into the product, the team, or the product category we are creating check out these resources:
Have you checked out
www.stopdigitalamnesia.com yet? We put this website together as a teaser for our announcement of Windows Home Server at CES. It is funny and informational!
This photo is of some of the SWAG we gave out at CES to go along with the marketing campaign.
Oh, and if you are posting screen shots of Windows Home Server on Flickr and tag them with "windowshomeserver", "whs", and "home server". Then add them to the
"Home Servers" Group.
I'm now about 1/3 of the way through organizing and filtering the over 4000 photos we took in Africa. I still haven't geo tagged any, but I appreicate the pointers I have gotten from people on good tools to use. Click here to see my Flickr set containing a sampling of the best shots we took.
I'm off to Europe tomorrow to visit with Windows Home Server partners and to see some of CeBIT. So far it looks like Windows Home Server has made a great splash there. CeBIT is a bigger show than CES (if you can believe that). Given I don't speak German, and Bablefish is not very good at translating German to English, I've had a hard time interpreting many of the blog posts and news articles that have appeared on the topic. But it's fun to try.
Our PR guy, Joel, posted a blog entry with some links to CeBIT on the Windows Home Server Team Blog yesterday. Check it out.
I'm hoping that I can spend some time on the airplane reviewing more of these photos...
This morning I used Windows Home Server's Compter Backup capability to “upgrade” my main workstation's HDD. Here's how I did it...
My main PC at home has a 60GB WD Raptor 10k RPM drive in it. For some reason that escapes me, long ago I had configured it such that I was only using one of these drives and I had it partitioned into two partitions (C: 40GB and D: the rest). Why I did this I can't remember, but it had turned into a royal pain in the butt because I kept running out of free space on the C: drive.
I store all my music, photos, video, etc... on Shared Folders on my home server so I don't really need tons of disk space on my PC. However, with all my apps installed I was pushing up against 40GB disk space and managing where things went between the C: and D: drive was annoying.
So this morning I decided to fix it by using the Home Computer Backup capability of Windows Home Server...
- Even though my Home Server tray icon indicated “Green” I ran the Home Server Console to verify that my PC actually did get backed up last night. It did.
- I put the Home Computer Restore CD in the DVD-ROM drive of my PC and rebooted, and pressed a key when it said “Press any key to boot from CD-ROM..“
- After about 2 minutes the Home Computer Restore wizard appeared.
- Stepping through the wizard I got to the part where it asks what drives you want to restore.
- I clicked on the disk manager button and used Disk Manager to delete the 2 partitions on my 60GB drive and created a single new partition.
- Then, back in the wizard I told it to restor my “39GB C: drive“ to the empty “60 GB C: drive“. I hit Next and.. took my son to his Lacrosse game.
- When I got back restore process was completed. I hit Next again in the wizard and the machine rebooted.
- When it started back up I was in Vista with a single 60GB C: drive.
- I had some folders on the old D: patition, so I ran the Home Server Console and choose “View Backups“ for my PC.
- I drilled into the backup from last night, choose the D: drive and clicked on “Open...“
- I was presented with an Explorer window showing me the folders on the D: drive as it was last night.
- I simply dragged the files to my C: drive and in a few minutes everything was back on C:. I had to tweak “Steam“ (the Half-Life game engine) to look at C: instead of D:, but that was easy.
This product rocks! I am so proud of my team and so excited to ship the darn thing so more people can experience how great it is too.
ComputerWorld has a comprehesive review of Windows Home Server.
“I found Home Server to be intuitive to use and very effective at backing up data as well as monitoring my home network's health. Its simplicity and automation will make it a winner with many home users. More technically savvy users, however, may find its limitations frustrating.
Microsoft has done a great job of hiding the complexities of server management in Home Server. ...
For my part, now that Home Server is installed on my network, it's not going to be unplugged.”
This is weird. I can understand people who have too much time on their hands creating fake product images of products that are not available yet. For example all of the mocked up images of Apple's products that show up on Engadget regularly.
I get that.
I also sorta get the fact that when the Wikipedia article for Windows Home Server appeared (the day we announced in January) it had a fake/mocked up screenshot.
But what I don't get is why someone who HAS our Beta 2 posts 25 *real* screenshots of the product along with one fake mixed in. The image you see here is of a screen that DOES NOT EXIST in Windows Home Server. It is fake. There is no "Windows Home Server Connectivity Console" in the product, there never has been, and we have no plans to create such a thing.
I've tried to track down who created this fake image and why but no luck so far. If you know anything about how it go created I'd love to hear from you.
UPDATE 3/1/07 4:45pm: The original image on Flickr has been deleted by whoever posted it. I had created a copy of it so I uploaded it to my Flickr account so people could see it. Whoever did this is reading my blog :-).
UPDATE 3/1/07 6:30pm: Updated the date of my previous update. I guess I wasn't paying attention to the whole February only has 28 days thing.
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