Friendly Bit - Web development blog

Fixing Microsoft’s bad reputation

2011-06-19T14:07:32+02:00

Microsoft has continuously failed at getting people in the tech crowd to like them. This is a growing problem for them, and something they need to start taking seriously. To understand how to turn this around, let's start a decade ago, with Slashdot.

Slashdot has always been one of the pillars of Microsoft-negative news. They have a whole category on Microsoft (And the others have lots of articles too: "Microsoft" articles on Digg, "Microsoft" articles on Reddit, "Microsoft" articles on Hacker News). With a few exceptions, articles (and comments) are about Microsoft using their monopoly to crush smaller businesses, how their technology is inferior to what the open source world creates, on them creating data lock-in where users are unable to switch away from them, and so on. Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News together have millions of daily users, who place as much faith in them as others do in their morning newspaper.

But these sites are only read by disgruntled teens right? No. Hacker news users are ~26, Reddit users are ~24, Digg users are 35-44… When asked: "What computer do you want?" These users answer: "A Mac (or Linux) laptop". When asked: "What software? They answer: "Google Docs (or LibreOffice/OpenOffice)". All those individual choices are starting to pile up, and have far-reaching consequences for Microsoft: Windows and Office licenses are the major part of Microsoft's income. Choosing a Mac or Linux laptop means no Microsoft Windows, choosing Google Docs or LibreOffice/OpenOffice means no Microsoft Office.

Tech users are a major force inside real companies, and not something Microsoft can just ignore. What about beginners and business users? They are both heavily influenced by by tech users. Beginners because they ask others for advise before buying their computers and software. Business users are instead controlled by their IT departments, which in turn try to find the most knowledgeable tech people to work for them. The small hold Microsoft still have on some IT departments is slowly shifted away from them when employees get empowered to choose their own equipment, moving them from business users to beginners in their purchase patterns. The tech crowd has more influence than you'd think.

Question is: where do you start fixing all this distrust? There's only one way: you start talking to tech users on their own terms. Here's how I would do it:

Hire some good of community managers. Their job will not be to market Microsoft, but to be the communication channel that can aggregate community opinions to Microsoft. The more rooted they already are in their respective communities the better; that makes it easier to start get the discussion started at a respectful level. You don't yell "Microsoft sucks!" at someone you respect.
Start by monitoring news about Microsoft and send monthly reports to managers inside Microsoft. Couple each news item with an approximate number of users that read them. This will paint an image of how tech users see the Microsoft brand. Pretty soon they will want to change that image.
Use community managers to ask for opinions on what to do next. Ask for small things that are likely easy to get done, and make sure to manage expectations right away. Windows 8 won't be open sourced :)
Have a small engineering team whose sole purpose is to make the suggestions from the tech crowd happen. They need to be cross-disciplinary, be well connected across the company, and have mandate from high up the organization. Employing this team is a small cost compared to other forms of marketing. Feed back any progress they make back as articles where they fit.
Lastly: Use insights from community managers to create marketing campaigns directly aimed at the tech crowd. A good community manager can have a pretty good guess at what work and what will. Many of the things will not only be marketing, but also require engineering, but there already is a team for that.

Working through that list will make Microsoft slowly earn their trust back from the tech crowd. It won't happen overnight; you don’t reverse 10 years of silence that fast. But I think this is doable, reasonable, and something that really could work.

Would you be willing to be a community manager for Microsoft? What would you suggestion Microsoft did to please the tech crowd? I'd love to hear your opinions.

Why people skip newspapers and read news on the web instead

2009-06-25T22:44:12+02:00

You can't be involved with what's happening on the internet without coming in contact with the "newspaper crisis" somehow. From a business perspective it's simple really: Much fewer people buy newspapers (on paper) nowadays. Please note that this has very little to do with advertisement or business models, I'm talking about newspapers from the user perspective here.

Internet is really a commodity nowadays. People process loads of information on the web every day, and this of course affects how they expect newspapers to behave. Every time I hold a big newspaper in my hands I'm surprised at how inferior it is compared to reading news on the web.

Newspapers have problems with references#

If I find an interesting news story on the front page, it's a mess finding the full article in there. The references are done with page numbers, but with page numbers that are local to a certain part of the paper. "Culture, page 7". And the culture part is stacked inside the part I'm reading, so I first have to find that one, then find the page numbers (which are removed from pages with ads), and then finally find the article I wanted.

The same is true for related articles. If I read an article I like, it's quite likely that I want to read other articles on the same subject. Newspapers solve this today by placing similar articles close to each other, and hope that you see them. This is of course limited, and gets harder when pages sizes shrink.

Compare this with clicking a link on the web. If I find an interesting article teaser, I click it, and am instantly taken to the full article. If that article was indeed as interesting as the teaser suggested, I'm often presented with similar articles, from similar categories, and can click them to move there.

Newspapers are slow#

Even the most frequently published papers are only distributed once per day. This simply means that papers can't compete on speed, being first with a certain story. Even if you happen to get your hands on a story at the perfect time, a paper still have to be both printed, and distributed to people. This takes hours.

What's worse, morning newspapers brand themselves as dealing with "today's news", when in fact it's the news from yesterday. This hasn't been a problem before, since there was no faster way to get news. Now there is.

If speed is important to you, you can easily subscribe to news via e-mail, Twitter or RSS, and be instantly updated.

Newspapers are static#

Articles in a newspaper are, once published, not possible to update and improve. They are left for the wind, even though there are inaccuracies or important clarifications to be made. Any conversation sparked won't be there.

This is of course the strongest argument for internet news. A big article will be different if you look at it later the same day. Comments and updates based on feedback are able to improve articles considerably.

Newspapers don't have enough unique content#

Big parts of daily newspapers contain poor rewrites, or plain copies, of articles from elsewhere. The reasoning is probably that they are trying to be exhaustive, give a broad view of what has happened. Problem is, they are hiding their own unique content behind loads of reposts of other's content.

The same happens on the web, but instead of copying the article you link to it. Then you get to read the news from the real source, and dig in deeper if you want to. Additionally, there's safegards that stop people from copying other people's content. For instance, Google have special filters for filtering out duplicate content.

Newspapers are not relevant enough#

The biggest reason why I don't subscribe to any newspapers is that they are not relevant enough. I'm not one bit interested in sports, and still, during big sporting events newspapers push them to the front page, over interesting internet-related news; things I find interesting.

The key here is of course to realize that relevancy is in the eye of the beholder. Only I know what I find interesting, and relevant. Why trust someone else's relevancy ranking when I can easily get my own ranking online? Even if I don't want to tailor-pick RSS feeds and build my own custom news feed, there's someone out there that has more similar taste than the four major newspapers here.

So, what should newspapers do?#

Well, they have two options: One, they could keep writing articles, hoping that the quality will be high enough to turn the trend, or Two, they could start thinking of how they deliver news. The expectation of how news should be served is changing. It now needs to be delivered…

… filled with references for digging deeper
… faster than once a day
… in a manner where people's contributions enhance it
… with a quality stamp that ensures that you're reading something you couldn't get anywhere else
… personalized to my own specific taste. No sports.

Is there any other way to do this than focusing aggressively on the web, and less on dead trees?

What is Web 2.0? Really.

2007-03-10T00:59:52+01:00

Web 2.0 is really hot right now. One of Sweden's biggest newspapers recently wrote a long article on their debate section. They had started linking back to blogs that linked to them, in a little box next to the article. The problem was that they had got into trouble with what blogs to link to. After all, you can't just link to anything, right?

Aside from starting to think about the implications of blog links, I got another interesting question in my head. What is Web 2.0 really? Most people working with interface development would say that Web 2.0 is everything that uses AJAX. But the newspaper didn't use AJAX at all, and still they claim links to blogs is Web 2.0. Time for some research!

The hunt for a definition#

The phrase "Web 2.0" was first put into widespread use at an O'Reilly conference in 2004. The organizers wanted to talk about a change that has happened on the web, and just bumping the version of the web seemed like a good idea. Paul Graham found this first try at defining Web 2.0 at the conference:

"While the first wave of the Web was closely tied to the browser, the second wave extends applications across the web and enables a new generation of services and business opportunities."

Note that there's no mention of AJAX there. Hell, there's no mention of users either! They must have meant something else, and the definition might have changed over the years since then. Let's keep looking for a good definition.

Tim O'Reilly comments on the issue two years later, in a clarification on his blog:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Tim acknowledges the change in meaning and talks about "network effects" here, something that starts to look a little bit more like what my idea of Web 2.0 is. But isn't there still something missing? To me, that looks only like a small part of what I call Web 2.0. Let's keep looking…

Gartner has tried to convince companies of the merits of Web 2.0 for a rather long time. In one of their many (business oriented) PowerPoint presentations they attempt to define "three anchor points around Web 2.0":

Technology and Architecture — Consisting of Web-oriented architecture (WOA) and Web platforms.

Community — Looks at the dynamics around social networks and other personal content public/shared models, wiki and other collaborative content models.

Business Model — Web service-enabled business models, mashup/remix applications and so forth.

I believe we're getting closer. Gartner is making business models a separate point which I don't agree with. Many of the biggest Web 2.0 sites didn't have a business model when they started (and many still don't). Digg has troubles covering their hosting cost with the tiny bit of money they acquire from their ads. Del.icio.us still doesn't make any direct money (although they got sold to Yahoo, and they surely use the data…). My point is, a business plan isn't one third of Web 2.0, it's something sites add afterwards if things work out.

So let me state my own (slightly more general) definition of Web 2.0:

"A collection of ideas and techniques that can be used to make more interactive sites"

The thing is, just doing something in AJAX does not mean it gets the Web 2.0 stamp of approval. You need several of the ideas or techniques and you need to combine them in clever ways. So lets agree on the definition above and got look for ideas.

Ideas that are part of Web 2.0#

I'd like to gather a whole bunch of ideas under the Web 2.0 roof. My selection is of course not all there is. Googling could uncover more I'm sure, but I think this is a good start.

User generated Content#

Many companies still view the web as a one-way medium, an extension of a paper catalog, it's main advantage being that it can be distributed to more people. It's not like that any more! There are people that want to add content to your site, that want to contribute their ideas and thoughts. Why are you denying them to help you?

User generated content is content that your users are willing to give you. It can be everything from a simple "like it" or "don't like it", to fully featured articles written by users. The two most used ways of contributions are the simple ones: votes and comments. The author is still in full control of the content but users are given a chance to chip in with minor corrections. This is the least you can do. It's what I do on this blog; let you chip in by commenting.

But if you have users that are passionate about your subject, users that are willing to use your site to get their ideas out, you should really endorse that! Allow them to post articles on your site, allow them to regroup and re-prioritize according to their own wishes. It is technically possible, even rather easy to do; you just have to do it.

Six simple things your users can help you with:

Reviews of your products
Comments on your articles
Stories about how people use your product
Multimedia using your product
Questions about your products
Articles in an area you choose

Radical trust#

Another approach many sites have taken can be summarized as "radical trust". It builds on the simple idea that users know what they want better than you do. So let them order, categorize, sort, select your data as they like!

This is exactly what wikis do. They acknowledge that there are more users doing good than doing bad. If that's the case, why not let them in on your content directly, letting them edit and improve it like they want. They few people that do bad can be hunted away with a combination with versioning (saving old versions of content that's easy to restore), and some simple monitoring. Wikis trust users, do you?

Syndication of content and services#

Web 2.0 is not only about "user to website" interactivity. It's also about letting other sites and tools interact with your site directly. This is often summarized as "syndication".

It's a very fancy word for a simple concept. Let me try to explain.

Somewhere you have some kind of database with your content, be it products in your e-store or posts on your blog. Usually you take that content, add some structure (HTML) to it, and send it to the user.

Another website that wants to access the same information could parse the HTML and try to understand what it means, something called "screen scraping" (or microformats ;). The problem with that method is that it's very dependent on that the webmaster doesn't decide to change the HTML. The other problem is that computers and humans often want different types of information. A computer that is going to parse a list of your products doesn't need navigation like humans do. What you do is send your data directly to computers instead, without messing it up with HTML. Formats include: RDF, RSS, or perhaps custom XML through a Web Service.

Thing is, when you start syndicating your data you make it easier for others build services based on it. Now people get several entrances into your content instead of the one you produced. Again, your users are helping you reach more people.

Allowing full RSS feeds is another way of syndicating, I'm switching right now. Do you syndicate?

Long tail#

The theory of the long tail is one of the ideas that are usually associated with Web 2.0. It's a business model that many companies that are successful on the web use. As with most business models they are invented after the fact, and as such I'm not sure it really belongs on this list, but people always bring it up, so let’s go. I'll let you choose yourself.

Wikipedia describes the long tail like this:

"Products that are in low demand […] can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough"

Most physical stores need to aim for the bestsellers to sell anything. There's simply too few interested in odd products, to make it worth hiring store space and personnel to sell it.

Web based stores are in a different position. Selling another product usually means just adding another page to your site, no extra store space or personnel needed. In addition people are prepared to wait a couple of days before receiving their products. That time span means you can skip warehouses and not start producing your products until you have an order ready.

No more is there a need to estimate what people will be interested in and pre-order them. For the right kind of product the internet is a huge benefit. Amazon did it with books, iTunes did it with music, do you do it?

Collective intelligence#

You have let each user customize their experience and add content of their own. Now it's time to organize that content to better help the everyone benefit from it. There's hundreds of ways of doing it, but here's a couple of things that you can present to your users:

The most popular Swedish article right now… - Crawl all Swedish blogs and keep track of what they link to.
Others that bought this book also bought… - Query your shipment table. Pick a product, select the number of times each other product appeared together with said product, and recommend that product to your customers. Amazon does this and it's said that it has increased their profits considerably.
You probably think this movie is a four out of five - A Swedish movie site give its users personalized ratings of movies. They find users that have similar taste as you have (based on your previous grades) and then checks what those people have rated the movie as.
This is probably spam - Write a word filter that learns what is considered spam when users mark them. Share that filter with fellow users and let their markings stop your spam. A form of collective sieve filtering, Akismet does this.

None of them are technologically hard to do, you just Google and copy other people's samples. Why not?

Techniques involved in Web 2.0#

But there are techniques involved too. Let's go through a few of the important ones.

AJAX (and other javascript)#

Everyone talks about AJAX together with Web 2.0, but I think it's important they are kept separate.

AJAX is just a technology that helps prevent (full) page reloads. Instead you connect to the server silently in the background and receive your data that way. What's the revolutionary about this technique? Nothing. It has been in use for at least 5 years. They new thing about it is that people started using it to build better interfaces.

Javascript is language that enables AJAX, and playing with reloads is not all it can do. Through some nifty use you can change attributes on any HTML element on the page. Move things around, react to mouse movement, fade and animate, it's your choice. This means a lot of new controls become possible, ranging from simple sliders to interactive maps.

Why do most accessibility people hate it? Because most developers don't know enough about accessibility. And when those start to use AJAX they disregard accessibility completely. Javascript and AJAX have different goals and I think a good compromise is making sure the basic functions of the site (buy a product and pay for it) works without javascript, but enabling it adds additional features.

When was the last time you used javascript to enhance your site? What was the last control you invented?

Feeds (RSS, Atom)#

Feeds are great for syndication of content. There are many different feed formats to choose from but they all have one purpose: to communicate pure data, skipping all design.

A feed is simply a list of feed items, each with an unique identifier. A user adds the address to their "feed reader" and it starts polling you, asking for updates. I have my reader set to just a couple of minutes, making sure I quickly notice changes in people's feeds.

The good thing about feeds is that they make it easy to follow several at once. There's no annoying different designs in the way if you don't want to (you can always just visit the site if you want design). Feeds are getting more and more of a commodity; you should already be allowing your users the possibility to subscribe your content. Do you?

Tags#

Tags is another hip concept. It deals with the collective intelligence idea and how to categorize content efficiently. A tag consists of a phrase of some kind that describes a piece of content. This blog post could have the tag "javascript".

There's several ways you can use them. One is the just fix what tags are allowed and use them as regularly groups you can assign content to. But allowing more than one tag enable you to do more than just split things into groups, you can instead pick all contents bits that have the same tag. You can go further, allowing custom tags that the users can pick themselves. That gives you a wide array of descriptive words for your content, free to play around with. For example, if many users pick the same word, that one is probably a better descriptor.

Picking many bits of content and analyzing all tags tied to them can be easily done with a tag cloud. In that you simply print all tags used after each other, and make those used often bigger. Doing this on a whole site is an effective way of giving users a snapshot of what you write about, something I know I like.

Can tags help you solve a categorization problem you have?

Summary#

Now. To build a Web 2.0 site, pick from both of the lists above. You Google for more ideas and you work hard to interact with your users as much as possible. Web 2.0 is the combination that happens when your ideas and technology finally just works.

Your users want to help you, do you let them in?