How to Fix Vista

I was told by my friends that I was too negative on Vista and I should offer some constructive ideas on how to fix it. Here is an outline of a plan for fixing Vista and creating more enthusiasm for the product. For starters focus more on the consumer segment. This is where the growth is. And do not wait another 7 year to ship an updated OS. Do it within 18 months. Here are some additional ideas:

1- Fix the driver incompatibility issues. I would talk to the engineers and see if they could write a compatibility layer to work with XP/2000 drivers. If not then get the OEM evangelists off their butts and start creating tools that make it dead easy for device manufacturers to create new drivers for some of the old stuff. Give them incentives so they would move their butts. Start a certified with Vista campaign and make it meaningful by making sure that certified drivers really do work better.

2- Get rid of the zillion of Vista SKUs down to 4. Home Basic/Premium and Business Standard/Enterprise. There are so many versions of Vista that it is very confusing for the customer.

3- Add some real value to the Premium editions. For example a very good photo editing, video editing, a good email program, and a good mapping program. Jazz up the media player. Most people now have multiple computers. Leverage the P2P technology and make sharing files, music, photos and videos a breeze. Kill Windows Home Server. Synch bookmarks, contacts and history among the computers. And finally add a good incremental backup solution so that all the data is centrally backed up. Make the PC fun not a drudgery. Also give the Vista Premium people a break on MS Office Home and Student Edition. Like $99 for the whole family. Make it a bundle with Word, Excel and Publisher.

4- It has been almost 2 years and there are still no applications of note that take advantage of the great graphics, p2p and video/audio conferencing capabilities. Looks like the Vista evangelist teams went to sleep. Even MS Office products decided not to take advantage of the cool new technologies. Light a fire underneath that team and get some cool applications that drive the adoption of the Vista PC.

5- Make it easier to tie it up with web 2.0 technologies. MS should be offering the equivalent of Apple MobileMe to the consumers. Online phtoto albums, VOIP calls, video conferencing etc.

6- Reduce the bloat and focus on performance. Compared to Mac OSX Leopard, Vista is a pig on an equivalent hardware. Get rid of all the crappy software that OEMs put on the PCs. It only slows things down and creates incompatibility issues. Slap HP and Dell and tell them to stop putting crap on the consumer PCs. It is only giving MS a bad name.

Team Leadership and Cricket

Ok I  admit it. I love cricket. I am a bit biased but I came across this article in cricinfo how an underdog team, the Rajasthan Royals,  with mostly B-grade players won the IPL (Kind of like the Super Bowl of Cricket). It is commonly known that that cricket teams from the sub-continent are fraught with in-fighting and unchecked individual egos. Playing as a team is a novelty. That a sub-continent team came together and played great team cricket is nothing short of a miracle. Here are some great lessons in people management and leadership. 

Here is the summary of how they managed to create a winning team:

1. The team had a clear vision of the type of team it was going to be and had the role of each player clearly defined. This was then committed to paper. It was later shared with each player and their input eagerly sought. With the help of player input the vision paper and the individual roles were further refined.  By the end each player knew clearly knew what to before a single game was played.
   
2. Egos were checked at the door and team play was emphasized. Of course it helped that one of greatest cricketer of all times was the captain of the team.
3. Go on-one with each team member and understand what makes them tick. Listen and don't just giver orders.
4. Make everyone feel they can contribute to the team.
5. You can't quantify how important  passion and drive are to the cause. It is all about trust, honesty and respect. Treat people fairly and evenly and they will respond. This goes against the traditional sub-continent management style, which is that as soon as you get power treat your subordinates like dung.
6. Look for something good. It is easy to criticize but harder to find something good to say. Build the players self-esteem.
7. Put forth a united front to the team . Discuss your differences behind the curtain but once a decision is made it must be  supported by all the leaders. The players must see a united front from the leaders.

Great stuff from the real world. Thanks Shane Warne and Darren Berry for saving me $29 bucks that I would have spent at Amazon.com on some fancy business management book.

Designing from the Outside In

Traditionally here is how a database driven application is built.
1- Talk to customers.
2- Draw an Entity-Relationship diagram
3- Design your database
4- Use some wizard driven software to create quick UI.
5- Call the designer to make it all look pretty.
6- Throw it to the user.
7- Iterate based on user feedback.

I own a small IT company where tracking down the hours spent per customer is crucial for cashflow. I was sick of employees recording their hours in spreadsheets and scraps of paper which then had to be entered in another spreadsheet and so on. So I decided to write my own billing and timesheet management software. I fired up VS 2005, designed by data base and data layer. And bascially followed the design process outlined above. I thought I got a great little app done and sent it over to my employees expecting them to be amazed by my coding prowess. Well.. things did not turn out as I expected. After a few days I noticed that nobody was using the TimeSheet software. Perplexed I finally asked one of my employees why he was not using it. He got up the courage and told me that it sucked. He was wasting more time entering data in my cumbersome software than ever before. So he swtiched back to paper and pencil.

I probed deeper and decided that the goal of my software should be accuracy and fast data entry. I had to do better than paper and pencil. I decided to design from the outside in. So the design process went as follows:

1- Talk to customer and observe how they worked with alternatives such as paper and spreadsheet.
2- I drew mockups on paper on what an input forms would look like. One employee said that the goals of the software could be achieved if the input form behaved like a spreadsheet but stored data like database. Bingo! We had a breakthrough interface. Easy and familiar to use but better than paper once I added auto-complete and a built-in timer for quickly recording time.
3- Built a mock UI in VS 2005 and let the users try it out. Got even better feedback.
4- Finally re-designed Views and UI to match the user feedback.
5- Connected it back to the data-models with some modifications. I had to add UI centric data tables in addition to the accounting data I had to capture.
6- Success. Users loved it. Improved billings by 25%.

I learned a big lesson. Designing from the outside in means:
1- Pay attention to the goals of the user. What makes their job easier. What makes using your software a less of a drudgery. Make your software fun to use.
2- Pay attention to the details to achieve 1. They really do matter.
3- Connect the user goals with the business goals. In the event of the timesheet software it was fun and easy data entry with accurate capture of billing data.
4- Plan for lots of iterations and feedback.
5- Work with the data model in parallel not in sequence.

So what does this mean for you the product manager? The answer is that design of your product is crucial. Be a leader and drive the design from the outside in.