Craig Bailey on Microsoft

I love the Sydney developer community. Really I do. Here’s why…

I’d previously organized a speaker for SBTUG tomorrow night, but he had to pull out (due to valid work travel reasons). This was two weeks ago. Then I got sick for a week and a bit, so it wasn’t until late last week I started getting around to finding replacements (yeah, I know – pretty disorganized for me). Two guys from the community quickly offered to help. But then one of them called me on Monday to say he couldn’t make it (due to valid health related reasons). No problem, Andrew Coates and Jodie Miners both jumped in to help at the last minute. They’ll be joining Ewen Wallace tomorrow night.

The funny thing is I reckon tomorrow night will be one of our best meetings in a long time. Take a look at the line up below:

Agenda for our 24 June 2009 meeting

Visual Studio 2010, Google Wave, plus Managing Customer Feedback – (click here to RSVP)

Come along and gain a high-level introduction to the productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2010; An overview of Google Wave, Plus a review of various customer feedback options including UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, Fogbugz, Bugzilla and more.

This meeting will be more informal than usual, with attendees free to ask multiple questions and contribute their experience.

6:00pm : News
6:30pm : Visual Studio 2010 Business Benefits: Andrew Coates (@coatsy)
7:30pm : Pizza
7:45pm : Handling Customer Feedback : Ewen Wallace (@CADbloke)
8:05pm : Google Wave Overview : Jodie Miners (@jodiem)
8:30pm : Finish

Click here to RSVP on Facebook.

Bonus: We have some cool prizes including Expression Studio, Security packages and movie tickets to give away.

We’re meeting in the usual place (Microsoft, North Ryde) at the usual time (6pm).

Here’s a summary of the presentations:

• Andrew Coates taking us through the business benefits of Visual Studio 2010, with a particular focus on the productivity enhancements coming. Ideal for developers and software managers planning adoption of Microsoft’s upcoming release.
• Ewen Wallace covering his misadventures in looking for a solution for developers to handle customer feedback. He’ll be covering UserVoice.com, GetSatisfaction, Fogbugz, Bugzilla, Mantis and others.
• Jodie Miners giving us an overview of what all this buzz about Google Wave is. Come along and get ready to rethink your approach to email, IM and online conversation.

Please note: If you arrive after 6pm, the doors will be locked. You'll need to call me on 0413 489 388 to come and let you in.

See you tomorrow.

Last Wednesday (13 May 2009) we had the first meeting of the newly formed (reformed?) Sydney Windows User Group (SWUG). Nick Rayner and I are leading the group, although to be fair Nick is doing 90% of the work. He’s the initiative, drive and main organizer.

And doing a fantastic job I must say. The first meeting was packed and had more interaction amongst attendees than I’ve ever seen in a long time. It bodes well for future meetings. (The group meets on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at Microsoft North Ryde, so make sure you get along to our next meeting on 10 June if you’re interested.)

At the first meeting we Nick covered an introduction to Windows 7 (now that the RC has been released – and we also had a loadfest prior to the meeting). After pizza I covered Touch on Windows 7, and then a few comments about Touch in general (eg on Microsoft Surface and even a quick look at the TouchWall).

The presentations are available here.

I’ve embedded a few of the videos I would have liked to have shown at the meeting (but sadly we’d run out of time).

Here’s a promo for the HP TouchSmart (which we all had a play with – thanks to Nick for bringing it along):

And here’s a look at Microsoft Surface discussed in a medical scenario. The important point from this is the value of touch as a mechanism for removing the barrier between doctor and patient. There’s a huge difference when a doctor has a monitor between you, and control of the input devices. But when both are sitting around a touch screen or table and interacting, those barriers are removed. There’s a ton of other scenarios of course including education (which I’ve mentioned before).

And here’s a look at the TouchWall (you may remember this being in the news a year or so ago). Consider team meetings when everyone can interact, as opposed to be held hostage by your boss hogging the mouse :-)

At our next meeting we’ll be taking a look at Windows Media Center in all its glory (details).

A big thank you to Microsoft (especially Jeff Alexander) for looking after us.

BTW: Don’t forget about the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) – our meeting next week (27 May) is looking at Adobe Flash & Flex compared with Microsoft Silverlight.

It’s been a little while since I posted here, so I thought I’d mention that I’ve been blogging over on Tech Repeater lately (RSS feed here). It hit the 50 posts milestone today, so I thought it might perhaps be of interest.

It’s mostly a fun side thing for now, although I do have some business related plans for it later in the year.

Tech Repeater is more general than this blog, and is best summed up as ‘tech stuff I find interesting’. It’s not particularly developer or community related.

I’ll still be posting here occasionally with items that are developer related.

I have literally spent half a day getting to the bottom of this error, so I’m posting my findings here in the hope it saves someone else having to do the same.

Bottom line: it’s your microphone settings.

I’ve been using Camtasia for years now and never had a problem. Yet, all of sudden today it started giving me this error when I started recording:

Failed to resume recording::Invalid Configuration State

After doing all the obvious stuff via Google, uninstalling everything I’ve installed over the past few weeks, changing display settings, installing DivX codecs & changing compression settings, and basically tearing my hair out, I finally found the problem after reading this post where user ‘malikah’ suspected something in the audio settings. Indeed he/she was right.

I discovered that my audio settings looked like this:

You’ll notice that I have two entries for the general Microphone (High Definition in the dropdown. Using either of these caused the crash. By simply switching the Audio device to be my Headset Microphone, everything worked fine. Simple when you know right?

Now, I’m not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are some conflicting microphone drivers or perhaps two copies of the drivers both attempting to grab the audio and thus causing problems. Why it has just started happening today I don’t know.

Anyway, I hope this helps. If you are having this problem, and you rule out the audio, then you may want to check this post where one of the Camtasia developers outlines a possible problem (and the solution) due to video compression settings.

Now, to go and reinstall all those applications…

[UPDATE: I tried to go and post this solution on the forum but it needed me to register. Annoying, but OK. Tried to register and their site has an unauthorized reCAPTCHA key and won’t take any new registrations. I tried…]

Here’s something that would be good for Microsoft to update:

I’d like to put a Live Maps link on the SBTUG home page so that people can get directions to the meetings (they are held at Microsoft Sydney Office at 1 Epping Road North Ryde). Unfortunately Live Maps makes this difficult. Here’s what gets returned from a search of the address. The Red box is what Live Maps thinks the location is, but I’ve added a green arrow indicating what the correct location should be.

And if I ‘enhance’ this search with a business name, here’s what I get. Live Maps gives the impression it doesn’t even know that Microsoft is located at 1 Epping Road.

But it gets worse, because the results instead include all the collection results contributed by other people. Of the 10 contributed results 8 are incorrect, so much so that the first result flags it as the New Zealand office (for my overseas readers, please note that New Zealand is an entirely different country!). The tenth result is the most correct.

Here, on the other hand is the Google result (it’s spot on):

It’s the little things that make the difference, and this is one reason why Google Maps still has the upper hand in my opinion.

More importantly though it highlights the problems with contributions from the ‘crowd’. With no mechanism for voting up or down the results and thus improving the value of Live Maps, users of Live Maps are liable to be mislead and become disillusioned with the service.

(Note: I used the Feedback link in the bottom right of Live Maps to let Microsoft know – and in order to indicate the correct location I referred them to the Google Maps result.)

(UPDATE: Fixed the URL on this post – apologies if you had trouble getting here via an external link)

Over on the ViaWindowsLive site they’re running a Virtual Earth contest. Simply submit an article or video about something cool you’re doing with Virtual Earth and you’re in the running.

You get a T-shirt just for entering (assuming your entry is valid :-), and there are a bunch of other prizes if yours is up the higher end on the awesomeness scale.

You can contribute your article or video on the Contribute Article page.

The site gets a fair amount of traffic, so is a good chance to get yourself some exposure as well as contributing to the community.

I was a little disappointed to read Microsoft’s Developer Strategy for the Next Generation of Windows Phones.

Unveiled last week, this PressPass piece indicates that Microsoft will be sharing 70% of sales revenue with developers for any Windows Mobile 6.5 applications sold through Windows Marketplace for Mobile. (Note: 70% is the same as Apple shares on their AppStore)

Put another way, Microsoft is charging you 30% of your sale, for giving you the opportunity to make your app available via Marketplace for Mobile. This seems high to me. Of course, having access to a huge international market is fantastic (and well worth the 30% commission I’m sure), and the promised feedback to developers on whether their apps meet certification requirements is extremely valuable.

But in a catch-up strategy (which Microsoft is definitely in), and with established channels such as Handango already in play (although to be fair they charge a whopping 40%), I was hoping for something spectacular from Microsoft.

Microsoft may still have significant market share in the mobile space, but it is eroding, and thus the success of endeavours like Marketplace for Mobile is vital for the platform. Microsoft needs to be attracting amazing mobile developers and encouraging the development of amazing mobile apps.

Ideally we’d be seeing Microsoft offering 95% share, with weekly competitions, awards for exceptional apps (as judged by their certification committee), special promotions of quality apps, etc.

Obviously there is significant infrastructure (and thus costs) required to facilitate the Mobile Marketplace, but extracting this from developers is not the way to proceed.

No, in this catch-up-to-the-iPhone-App-Store climate, Microsoft needs to view Mobile Marketplace as a marketing expense, not a monetization strategy.

Aside: In some ways this reminds me of the mistake Microsoft made with the early versions of its developer tools for Office (VSTO).  Initial versions required special ISV partnerships, followed by versions charged at a hefty license fee. Not until recent years has VSTO become part of the Visual Studio install, and even now it still has some hurdles, since it is only included in the Professional Version and above. IMO, putting the VSTO tooling in the Express versions is long overdue, but that’s a topic for another post…

Perhaps you missed this little gem: Photosynth Map Explore.

I hope not, because I think it represents an interesting insight into the future of location.

A little while back I was underwhelmed with Photosynth, but I did look forward to improvements with location being tied in. Photosynth Map Explore is the answer. It’s early days, but the potential here is huge. I love it.

I was, and still am, looking forward to every photo being geo-tagged and angle coded. But here’s the obvious tipping point I missed. At some point we’ll get to a point where we have enough geo-tagged photos that we’ll be able to go in reverse. We’ll be able to upload an older photo, and with technology like Photosynth, be able to reverse calculate where it was taken.

You can see where I’m heading right? With enough photos catalogued in a site like the Photosynth Map Explore site, we’ll be able to slot in a photo and have it tell us where the photo was taken.

And the beautiful thing… every new photo that gets reverse located, adds further to the overall database, and makes the coverage even better.

The possibilities are endless. We haven’t even discussed the overlaying of timestamp data on the coverage. You’ll be able to reverse not only a location, but perhaps even the time it was taken (as landmarks, seasons and other characteristics change). And then the obvious step is to be able to do this for any frame in a video.

I’m actually pretty excited about this. And intrigued. Just as Google Maps and Live Maps has brought national security considerations into the conversation (and with just satelite imagery), imagine how potentially disruptive technology like this could be. 

Find out more about Photosynth here.

(For a good overview read the LiveSide post.)

I’ve been wondering what’s next after Twitter. Where are all the cool kids heading these days?

After all, it has become so mainstream now that the inevitable transformation from intimate community to marketing broadcast is all but complete. The vibe on Twitter has changed.

Yes I know, that’s what the Un-follow option is for, but that doesn’t stop the fact that Twitter has changed. And for me, I guess I’ve become a little disillusioned of late. Here’s a few thoughts.

Warning: tongue-in-cheek *analysis* follows:

People follow you to be followed back

Has this been going on for a while, or has it just started in the last few weeks?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I have to say it is a shame to see that some of the ‘interaction’ on Twitter has changed to promotion and micro popularity contests. I realised this recently when I started getting followed by a lot more people than normal. Strange, I thought. Perhaps I’ve got something useful to say :) Think again.

The giveaway is when you get a whole bunch of new followers each day, and yet you finish the day with less followers than you started. Why is that?

Here’s another giveaway: you get followed by someone, and then they follow you again a few days later. Yep, you were quickly un-followed, and then they’ve had another go, not realising that you were a previous attempt.

I suspect that a fair proportion of my new followers are simply following me in order to get a follow back. Why? Because… if you have a lot of followers you must have something important to say, right? And if you have a whole bunch more followers that you follow, then you must be particularly important. And (so the logic goes) if you’re important then people are more likely to buy your stuff.

Now, a few months ago this was probably true. In my usual circle (technology), if you had a lot of followers you probably did have something worth hearing. But since moving into additional circles recently (SEO, social networking, small business, media, etc) I’ve seen much different behaviour. It seems as though ‘conversation’ has been replaced with ‘competition’.

Gee, I’m starting to feel a little left out in this competition…

How to feel more popular

Take my profile as an example. I’m always following new people, as well as following back probably 70% of people who follow me (the interesting ones). As such, here’s my profile as of Thursday 12 March.

You’ll notice I follow more people than follow me. Ooops. This represents a major no-no in the popularity stakes. Fun little tools like Twittergrader will help me see the light. For example, here’s how Twittergrader grades me:

Time to make amends. I need to improve my followers-to-following ratio.

No problem, I’ll just go through and un-follow a bunch of people. Here’s the results after some purging.

Let’s see how Twittergrader rewards me:

Awesome. I’m now ranked 2,000 positions higher and my grade has improved slightly. See, ranking higher is as simple as cutting back on the conversations you engage in! My online engagement experience is poorer, but I have the warm fuzzy feeling of being just a little bit more popular.

With a bit more purging I reckon I can improve my grade into the 99 percentile and fool myself into thinking I’m actually interesting!

(btw: wouldn’t it be good if Twittergrader added some categorisations too: <80 = you’re boring, >90 = scintillating, >99 = The sun shines from your…, etc)

How to be popular

A quick start guide for the newbies - here’s how to fool yourself into feeling really popular:

1. Find someone that actually is popular (example)
2. Go through their followers list and start following
3. Wait 24-48 hours – you can probably expect at least a 20% follow back response
4. Un-follow just about everyone
5. Inspect updated Twitter grade
6. Enjoy warm fuzzy feeling
7. Find someone else that is really popular and repeat

Advanced strategies

Here’s a few advanced tips for newbies, particularly those working in marketing departments or small businesses, who have just heard about this new ‘Twitter phenomenon’:

• Do: buy in to the whole ‘Twitter is an un-tapped market’ philosophy
• Do: treat every follower as a potential sale (as opposed to a conversation)
• Do: send out marketing messages almost straight away (hey, people can’t wait to buy your stuff)
• Do: assume that you are one of the first to discover this Twitter thing, and that you have a wonderful window of opportunity to do nothing else but promote your products
• Do: promote yourself as a social media strategist/expert even though you’ve only just joined Twitter this week

Don’t underestimate the change

Hey, look, obviously I’m just having a bit of a light-hearted look at things here, so don’t take it too seriously. Sure, promotion and marketing are important – don’t get me wrong – of all people I’m especially aware of this as I build a new business with my wife.

And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having lots of followers, or a good ratio.

The problem is when the pursuit of followers changes behaviour, conversations and engagement on what has been a wonderful, intimate, ego-less ecosystem so far. It’s a subtle change, but one that’s growing.

Am I over-reacting? Perhaps. And yes, quite possibly this is just a case of sour grapes because I’m not very popular :-)

But here’s my prediction: give it a few months and the release of soon-to-be revealed Twitter monetization strategies and I think many of the foundational Twitter members will be moving on.

And thus my opening question: Given that Twitter has changed, where are all the cool kids heading to now? Any thoughts?

This was originally titled: “Frustrations with Microsoft – Part II” and is a follow on from my post in January. But I decided to change the title so that it comes across more positive. I don’t actually like complaining (seriously!) and my real aim is to provide constructive thought, so tweaking the words a bit will hopefully help.

That said however, I do see a problem with how Microsoft engages with the wider developer community, both here in Australia and globally. I’ve been chatting through these ideas with a few people over the last months, and whilst I get some occasional nods of agreement, I realise for the most part I’m on my own. But I’ll put it out here anyway. Let me know your thoughts…

It’s about discoverability

The issue as I see it is that Microsoft still hasn’t worked out how to engage with the wider developer community. I’m sure they know this is a problem, but I don’t see much initiative from them in solving it.

Here’s the reality: You reach developers via a Google search result.

That is, the majority of developer engagement is via a useful search result link.

And thus, Microsoft needs to work on SEOing their massive cache of developer resources (MSDN, TechNet, blogs and product sites) in order to provide appropriate content to search savvy developers. It’s about discoverability.

Before we go on…

An aside: You may or may not know that I was laid off from my job at nsquared in January. This isn’t the post to discuss why, however the reason I mention it is because for the past month I’ve been working on my wife’s site at Get Organized Wizard*. During that time we’ve been getting our heads around SEO, Social Networking and Google AdWords (amongst other things like product creation and general website development).

Here’s the biggest lesson we’ve learnt: People must be able to find you!

Obvious right? Yep. You might have great products, but if people can’t find them, then what’s the point? It’s absolutely crucial that every business understand just how important discoverability is. And by discoverability we mean two things:

1. Knowing what people are searching for, and

2. Optimizing our sites to be found for those terms (ie Search Engine Optimization).

The wonderful thing: most of our competitors have really bad SEO. By tweaking our site, we are climbing up the search results pretty quick. For some of our terms we are now on page 1. But we’ve still got a lot of work to do. And don’t get me wrong – it isn’t easy. In fact, it’s really hard. I guess that’s why there’s a whole SEO industry doing really well now…

Why do I mention this experience? Simply because I think this is a micro-shot (that’s kinda like a micro snap-shot :-) of the problem Microsoft is facing with developers.

Microsoft and Developers

Back to Microsoft engaging with developers. Microsoft has lots of great content, but it’s just not in a format that is easily found by the “majority of developers”. Keep in mind that the “majority of developers” are those still working in .NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. They aren’t the minority who are well informed on the latest tools, attend user groups and follow prominent bloggers. No, the majority are the back room guys and girls who provide and maintain the bulk of enterprise software infrastructure out there. Let’s call them the normal developers :-).

Microsoft’s problem is how to engage with these normal developers.

Here’s an example of the kinds of things a normal developer might search for:

Silverlight compared to WPF

I’ve spoken to many people who are still confused about WPF. Here’s a common question: I’ll get asked if WPF is a good strategy for web development and if it’s better than Silverlight. Silly right? Well no, actually. Because it indicates the message isn’t getting communicated well. That’s valuable feedback. And is it any wonder? Take a look at the search results – if you’re unsure what WPF is, then you’re probably still going to be confused after looking through the first page of links**. There’s an opportunity for developer engagement here.

[For the record: WPF is not a web technology, it is client side only (although it can be deployed as an XBAP). And for some clarity on Silverlight, here’s my post from 2007: Flash versus Flex versus Silverlight).]

Long tail searches

Here’s another example, this time on a longer tail term:

Microsoft is always going to rank 1 for generic terms (eg a search for SharePoint is always going to show a Microsoft site first), but it’s the longer tail terms that developers are really searching for. Take a look at this search term: “how to install SharePoint services” and tell me if you think the results** are high quality. These kinds of things are another big opportunity for Microsoft to engage really well with developers.

Damage control

And taking it a step further, it’s not only developer engagement, it’s also damage control. Take an example from my own blog:

One of the more popular posts on my blog has been this one: How to Uninstall IE8. These days (almost 12 months after I originally wrote it) it still gets a reasonable amount of traffic. Why? Because it ranks well. Here’s yet another opportunity for Microsoft – this time to capture an angry audience and soothe their frustrations. If Microsoft could rank number 1 for this search term, and then take the user to a friendly page that walked them through not only how to uninstall, but also offered solutions for common frustrations with IE8 they might just win back a few users they’d otherwise lose.

So, how do they go about this?

The solution: dedicated SEO specialists at Microsoft

As I mentioned earlier, the solution to discoverability is two-fold:

1. You need to know what people are searching for

2. Once you know what they want, you need to make the right content rank well for those terms

This is essentially internet marketing 101. Sounds easy of course, but it’s really hard. It’ll take time. 

In my opinion Microsoft needs to do this if they are going to engage successfully. Instead of developers being directed to advert-laden, dodgy IT forums and years old sites when they search Google (eg see the earlier search example results), they need to be directed to appropriate content on Microsoft sites. 

Each product team needs to have a dedicated group of Keyword researchers and SEO trained content authors. If they aren’t already, they should also be providing training to all their higher profile bloggers on how to target and rank for specific search terms.

Keyword researchers should be using feedback from the developer evangelists and technical specialists to narrow in on what terms normal developers are searching for (point 1 above). And then use SEO specialists with their technical writers and product managers to create/format the content appropriately (point 2 above).

Let me stress: this isn’t about lack of good content. I’ve been really impressed with the initiatives Microsoft has put into providing excellent community portals, full of rich, useful information. The problem isn’t lack of content. The problem is getting it to the right people.

Some final thoughts

The days of flashy events, road-shows and other extravaganzas are pretty much gone for the next few years. Microsoft needs to spend its marketing dollars really strategically now.

Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft needs to optimize for Google ranking (which is quite different to Live Search ranking). With things like Universal Search mainstream now, LSI pretty much a requirement, and the growing importance of micro-formats for SEO, Microsoft needs to plan strategically for Google result dominance (as well as understanding that ranking in Live Search is not going to guarantee any results in Google).

Divisional structure will be a problem

Microsoft is a big company so I’m sure there’s a ton of different departments and divisions working out how best to spend marketing and advertising dollars. The problem is that there’s often no real unified strategy for targeting developers. Each division has its own KPIs. That’s why expensive banner ads and trade magazine pages seem to be the standard approach for many marketing efforts. I’m guessing the conversion rates on these are very low, and achieve little more than brand awareness.

But if some of those marketing dollars were spent on proper SEO initiatives and driving developers to the right pages, I’m sure there’d be much greater buy-in from users, and a much higher willingness to be cross-sold to.

But hey, I’m not a marketer so I realise I’m speaking from ignorance here! So consider this last point less as a suggestion for how to do it, and more as feedback as to what I, a developer, would prefer to experience.

Conclusion: Developer engagement

Coming full circle now and back to engaging with developers, it’s pretty simple to see how Microsoft can improve their reputation significantly and foster deep developer satisfaction: Find out what they want, and make sure they can get to it! But it’ll take a change in approach from both marketing and technical teams, and with it a re-working of the incentives and KPI structures in place.

* Get Organized Wizard provides organizers and systems for organizing your life, personal organization and goal setting. Sign up for the Newsletter and get a free SMART Goals pack. Why this paragraph? Yes, you guessed it – for the SEO benefits.

** Note that your search results might be different to mine – Google tailors results based on your search history – but hopefully the results you see will be similar to mine and you’ll understand my point.