shahine.com/omar/

What happens when you take two different brands, and combine them together? MSN Live. Nice I didn’t even see that one coming. Not even CNet gets our branding strategy.

I’m just going to start calling our service Windows Live Hotmail to clear things up.

Wow, this is a big deal. I love the A9 toolbar and the discount I get for shopping at Amazon but I stopped using it long ago.

Last night Lora and I ate at Gary Danko’s with some friends. I’ve always wanted to eat there, but could never manage to get reservations. Anyway, this was a phenomenal culinary experience. Gary Danko has a menu where you pay by the number of courses you want. I decided to have 4 courses: 1) appetizer, 2) main course, 3) cheese and 4) desert. Everyone else had 5 courses, and of course I sampled most everything. The bad news is at step 3 I was full. Luckily we were there for so long that I was able to digest a bit and eat some more.

We also got lots of little “gifts” from the Chef along the way, which filled us up even more. Everything was amazing, including the service.

Oh, and the wine prices there are obnoxiously expensive.

Went to Startup School at Stanford this morning with Bubba and heard some interesting talks with the usual Microsoft bashing of course (I have thick skin). Bubba has some good commentary on his blog about how at Microsoft, you actually get to do a lot of the things they are teaching at Startup School when trying to launch new products, or build new teams and get funding etc.

Right now I am sitting at a Discount Tire place getting my tires balanced by a Road Force machine (my tires are apparently finicky and currently vibrate at 70mph). I hope they can fix it or I’ll likely need new tires.

I’m sitting outside though cause it’s gorgeous today (can’t wait to move to the Peninsula) and of course cold and cloudy in San Francisco.

Oh, Lora and I bought a house in Menlo Park and will be moving sometime in June . Now all we need to do is sell our place in San Fran!

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we’ve changed the account expiration policies for Windows Live Mail Accounts. That was one example of an anti-user policy that we’ve worked to address in our new product. There are a few more we’ve been working on, and they all share a common thread… meeting the expectations and needs of the customer while at the same time being responsible about our business.

One thread that has remained constant since the first day that we started work on Windows Live Mail is the struggle we’ve had with the advertising experience. We knew that many aspects of WLM would be different from the current Hotmail. We added such features as the reading pane, something that we were not sure would make it into the final product. In an effort to remain consistent with our existing advertising footprint, we simply assumed that we would design our interface with all the same ad formats and number of ads. However, at the same time we generated this concept of flights. A flight is a variation on the default experience. For example, one flight might not have a reading pane at all, one flight might only have one ad etc. We did this so that we could objectively measure the satisfaction of the customers in those flights and make good decisions about such important issues as advertising.

Before I go into what we learned, lets talk about the ad formats. In WLM there are three ads. The first is a square ad and appears in the Today page and the Sent Mail Confirmation page. These ads you see infrequently. Then there is the super banner, which appears at the top of the window. Finally there is the skyscraper ad, which is the tall skinny ad that appears to the right of the reading pane.

Now, the ad that posed the largest challenge to the design is the skyscraper. Because we design for 1024 x 768, the sky scraper simply doesn’t fit. You see, the ad formats are standard in the industry and the sizes were chosen in a pre-ajax world; before you had applications living inside of a window. The skyscraper is great for a scrolling web page, but not for a fixed width and height product. As such we spent many many weeks designing and coding a mail product that tried to maintain an advertising footprint that had both the banner and the skyscraper in a 1024 x 768 window. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy.

Meanwhile, over a period of months we learned a lot from our users about what they thought about our design; they liked it but felt like the reading area was too small.  They pointed to the skyscraper ad as the reason.  The flights we ran allowed us to measure just how users felt about the different experience, and what percentage of them were opting out of the beta. Early on users complained about different problems, but as time went on and as we addressed the majority of feature and service complaints the space/advertising issue bubbled to the very top, and it was time we did something about it.

Now, let’s look at this from a different perspective; that of the business and the advertisers. In order to spend ad dollars you are going to want to go to a company that has ad inventory to offer you. You also want to go to a place that has a lot of eyeballs and engaged users. We are such a place, and as you might guess, our service is funded most significantly by advertising dollars. Any change in revenue needs to be explained internally (ultimately with sound data).  While we were looking at the consumer feedback we were also looking at the advertiser feedback, particularly on the skyscraper.  Was it a good ad offering?  Was it effective?  What would removing it do in their world?  Would removing it make existing ad properties more valuable to them?  Would removing the ad create a better customer experience which would in turn be more valuable to them?  We believe the answer to this last question is “yes”.

Understanding the business of advertising, and the business of being an ad-funded communication service are things that I knew little about when I joined Hotmail 2 years ago. Our team has worked incredibly hard to measure and explain these things in the context of customer satisfaction (consumers AND advertisers) and our goals around growing our customer base as well as the number of minutes they spend in our service. We have gotten incredibly disciplined and downright good at knowing all about these things, while at the same time we’ve done the same with our Quality of Service and features relative to the competition.

At the end of the day why does this all matter? Because this is where all the competitive action is going to take place in the next few years. Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft are all going to be competing for one thing… advertising dollars. And how are they going to get the most advertising dollars? Better products, better advertising platform, better user experience, more engaged users and ultimately the right advertising inventory.

So, what’s the big deal, and why am I writing this. Well, one of my philosophies, and something I think our team shares is Don’t piss off the customer.

How do you piss off the customer?

1. Give them a 2 MB inbox
2. Don’t save their sent mail, or make it difficult to do so, and then delete their sent mail after 30 days.
3. Make their inbox about advertising instead of about their email
4. Have crappy Quality of Service.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me. All of these things are anti-customer. What’s the point of offering a service that’s anti-customer? I sure as heck have no intention of working on a service like that. I never would have taken the job that I did if I didn’t know and feel that everyone around me was driven and motivated to fix all of these things, and we have been working on all of these since day I started this job.

Starting next month we are reducing the number of advertising from two graphical ads to a single ad in the inbox. The skyscraper will be gone from Windows Live Mail! I hope people see this as an olive branch from us to the user, and the advertiser. The users will be happier and more engaged, and the advertisers will ultimately benefit in the end. This change and its impact is an investment that we believe is a smart one to make.  Everyone in MSN has been supportive of this decision and we wouldn’t be making it if we didn’t feel that it was the right thing to do and better for all of us in the long term.

Like our decision to extend account expiration from 30 to 120 days, this decision was months of work from dozens of people in our organization. We have more work to do, but the signs are all looking good .

This totally makes my day. Yesterday my outlook calendar became read-only. No matter what I lost rights to my calendar (I’m using Office 2007). A quick email to our internal office dogfood support DL and I had a Dev using Remote Assistance on my box to fix the corruption that happened. At the end he thanked me for dogfooding and apologized for the inconvenience.

Now that’s how to treat internal customers. One less bug for a customer to encounter, I hope I saved some one on their some pain.

C|Net has a great feature on Windows Live Mail. A few weeks ago Ina Fried came to campus and interviewed a number of folks as well as sat in on some meetings. I wasn’t on campus that day which is a bit of a bummer (was at ETech) but I see that I made it into the article anyway .

Ina hints at some of the changes we’re making to the service very shortly, something I discussed with Scoble yesterday when he was down filming our team for Channel 9.

We’re getting ready to push our next version to the site, and I can’t wait.

Trevin found a fantastic service that lets you simply take any web page and send it to your inbox to read later on. This is great for us GTD folks who wish they could simply throw web pages into their Read/Review pile but can’t because they are offline when they get around to having some spare cycles to read that page.

This way it goes into my “inbasket” and onto my task list with everything else.

Check out toread.cc.

I’ve been dreading this day. Not because I am bummed or worried that Google launched a calendar, no… I was dreading this day because my inbox is now filled with “Hey did you see that Google launched a calendar”? Every single DL I’m on is linking to and discussing it. Um, no I haven’t noticed at all . Ugh… now everyone will want to know what we are building.

At least Dare has his thinking cap on.

I’m pretty excited that Niall is coming to help us build a RSS platform inside of Windows Live. I got to interview Niall and we had a great talk; I am convinced he’s the perfect guy for the job and I’m looking forward to working with him. Dare should get that referral bonus .

Since 1998 I’ve been driving an Audi. First was a 1998 A4 2.8 Wagon that I leased for 3 years. Then I got a 2002 A4 3.0 Sedan. I’ve loved every day we’ve owned it. We are about to move out of the city since Lora will be continuing her medical training at Stanford and we will need a second car. There are a lot of cars that I want but one car I’ve always wanted is the Audi allroad. It’s an SUV in the body of a sport wagon. Well they no longer sell them in the US due to the advent of the Q7, Audi’s new ugly SUV. So the allroad will be a European only offering since Audi doesn’t want to sell two SUV like cars to American’s. Bummer.

Anyway, I was looking around this past Friday and found that the Audi dealership in San Francisco had a few used 2002 allroads. I had to get one with a built in Nav system and Parktronic cause I currently have those on my A4 and can’t live without them. So that limits me to about 3 used cars in the entire bay area. Well one of those happened to be one I test drove on Saturday and we decided to buy it. It’s amazing how quick car transactions are. We signed the papers and walked out in about 20 min and picked up the car later in the day. It’s certified pre-owned so it comes with a warranty which is a big plus.

I love the car. It has a 250 hp V6 bi-turbo engine, and handles really well (it has speed sensitive steering which is really cool). Since it’s the same model year as our other Audi all the options are near identical but it’s got some we don’t have like tire pressure sensors, a heated steering wheel, pneumatic suspension that gives you up to 8 inches of ground clearance…. wicked cool.

I really love Audis. The Quattro 4 wheel drive is fantastic, the dealerships are great, and the fit and finish of the car is better than BMW IMHO. I also love buying used cars now! We saved a bundle.

Trevin has a post on a recent management training class he took at Microsoft.

This class is the replacement for a class that used to be called Management Essentials.

I took Management Essentials 3 years ago. It was the single biggest life changing event for me in the context of my professional career. Reasons why the class is amazing:

• The people. You are simply floored by the quality of the people and the rich discussions you’ll have.
• The instructors. Superb.
• The fun and competition. You play some really fun and competitive simulations.
• The immersive learning experience.
• The lack of email, and real “touch” with the real world.

Probably the biggest thing for me was the fact that it was the first time I was taken out of the context of my personal and work life and was able to view myself and what I was doing objectively. Sort of like a third person view into my life.

For me, that class was the beginning of many changes I would take in my life (including a new job at Microsoft). I really cherished the experiences I had, and the people I hung out with. It’s nothing short of amazing that Microsoft has this course.

If you are a manager at Microsoft, you should take this class about 2 years after you become a manager. And you should probably take it every 5 years.

A few weeks ago, Tom Raftery posted about his recent experiences with Hotmail in a post titled “Microsoft Hotmail, you suck!”

Tom states:

“Why am I annoyed? - Microsoft’s insistence that you have to log into Hotmail every 30 days or they delete all your info. I don’t use Hotmail much, but I have had my Hotmail account for years and there was tons of old email info in there. I logged in today (after obviously more than 30 days) and I find all my info has been deleted by Microsoft.”

…

“Why impose such a shortsighted policy of deleting people’s info after 30 days when your main competitors (Yahoo! and Gmail) don’t have any such policies as far as I know.”

Well everyone has some kind of policy. It just so happens that ours is really not ideal for so many reasons. This has been a constant pain point for our customers, and a problem that most of us working at Hotmail today simply inherited.

Is it acceptable? No. I apologized to Tom on his blog, but the reality is, we’ve lost Tom as a customer forever. Do I feel responsible in some way? Yes.

This policy is something many folks on my team have been working to address. It’s just one of many things about our service we are attempting to change. I’ll blog about some more changes coming pretty soon, but I would like to say that we have changed the policy for Windows Live Mail accounts to 120 day expiration. It’s not forever, but the reality is it cannot be forever (unless you are a premium user and pay a subscription). There are really valid business reasons for this.

Anyway, I’m glad we’ve made this change for Windows Live Mail user. As we migrate our user base to WLM everyone will benefit from the extended expiration times for accounts. For folks in many developing nations, as well as students who might not check their accounts in the summer, 120 days should protect their accounts much better than 30 days.

I just sent Tom a Windows Live Mail Invite to fix his storage issue and hopefully the expiration issue if he still cares to use the service. Sorry Tom!

One thing that I learned early in my career at Microsoft is that if you become the "go to guy" on your team, you get more visibility. More visibility helps you win at "the game". Why? Cause when people in your food chain or elsewhere in your company have never even met you, but you've been prompt and cordial with their communications to them, they are going to think you're a "good guy" and a "useful resource". As soon as you drop their email or question on the floor, you risk having the bozo bit flipped. This is especially true when you work in a remote campus and many of the folks you interact with are elsewhere.

Of course, actually meeting some one and getting to know them is much better, and once you build that trust communicating gets a lot different. But who has time for that? Microsoft is a culture where people in offices next door would rather email each other cause chances are you aren’t really in your office and who want to waste time finding out you aren’t there? Use the phone? hah!

Why am I writing this? cause Itzy has a good post on the topic.

Responsiveness tells me you have a handle on your job. Of course this doesn’t mean answer all your email on a Thursday night at 4 am. You risk trying to look like a Hero when you’re not. Respecting your own work life balance and that of others tells me you are on top of both your job and your life.

Of course there are going to be cases where dropping the email on the floor is the appropriate thing to do. This can be useful in cases where the question or nature of the question doesn’t even warrant a response. Chances are the question won’t ever be asked again cause it was never meant to be asked. You have to be careful when doing this, cause the last thing you want to do is burn bridges.

Leave it up to Apple finally acknowledge that they are in fact a hardware company. And what a great name for a product… Boot Camp will finally raise the bar for the PC OEMs. You are now on notice and either need to figure out how to make your commodity business work or risk losing all the folks like me who care what our PCees look and sound like. Any company that spends time designing a good power supply for a laptop in a market where no one else even thinks about that has a special place in my heart.

Imagine if we named this thing! It would be called: “Microsoft Windows XP Professional Boot Selector Beta for Windows and Macintosh Systems”. But Boot Camp says what it does in 2 words .

Kudos to Apple, especially Steve Jobs. Off to store.apple.com to find out what new shiny object I need for a computer. Maybe I’ll start with a mini.

What’s next? WMA support on the iPod? (don’t I wish)