“Microsoft wonders why people get so upset when the Windows system crashes, and they try to point out that it crashes less than Apple. But try telling that to an Apple person, and they’ll vehemently deny it. And the reason why is that Apple has been able to create a halo of good experience around its products.”
– Ziba Design’s, Steve McCallion quoted in the book Glimmer by Berger.
Reading Scoble on bloglines. As a Microsoft employee he is at the office at 1:46 AM. He is not alone. The first post is followed up by another post including a photo link of a whole group of volunteers working on their own time. They believe in the product that much. That is formidable competition for anyone going up against live.com!
Live.com Upgrades in progress
Wow, that’s fast. There are a few teams pulling an all-nighter
across the freeway from where I’m sitting right now (yeah, I’m still at
the office at 1:46 a.m.) working on pushing up new code to Live.com and
Richard MacManus already has a post about the changes.
And Edelman just brought a committed employee on board
That was the situation I was in yesterday and it’s why I am now at 4:30 a.m. getting around to posting.
Is that what it takes to succeed in the attention economy?
Microsoft has released SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. I found it via Sunbelt Software. From the SNARF site:
OverviewMicrosoft Research’s Community Technology presents SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder.SNARF was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long.
"The magic moment will come when our search is demonstrably better than Google’s," – Bill Gates, 2005