Somewhere Microsoft may still have a warehouse full of beautifully printed manuals from an obsolete product because I crusaded on behalf of our customers. It took me a bit too long to notice the customers didn’t really care, and had never requested the kind of generosity I offered.
I joined Microsoft in 1996 as a Program Manager for Visual Basic, at the time the most popular programming language on the planet. Everything about that job was ridiculously good, from my kind and brilliant coworkers to the product to Microsoft itself. I am forever grateful to Bill Gates for creating such a wonderful company, and for the opportunity to work for the developer tools division, which can only be described as a dream come true.
So about my cleaning service
We have a large house. We’re messy. We hire people to clean it every week and here’s what we want: a mediocre cleaning done quickly. It’s not that I want cheap (I have plenty of flaws, but underpaying for labor is not one of them). It’s that I work at home and don’t relish the interruption.
We are forever trying to find a cleaning service that will give us lots of coverage without much detail. Stained grout in the kitchen? We don’t care. We just want the cooktop cleaned reasonably well. Dusty floorboards? We don’t notice. Clean the toilet and I’ll be thrilled. Oh, and those little rosettes on the toilet paper? Creepy, in my opinion. I’d greatly prefer you get the gunk under the dishrack in the kitchen sink than tie rosettes in three bathrooms. Instead of being sloppy and quick the way I’d like, the cleaning services lavish vast amounts of time on things I don’t care about, like straightening up the pillows on the couch or reorganizing our messy bathroom counter. We spend $250 for a weekly cleaning that takes 4 hours. I’d be only too grateful if they’d do the same job in 2 hours and skip the rosettes. I make my request very clear: be sloppy. The cleaners ignore it. They know better… right?
Visual Basic 5.0 was the first programming language from Microsoft to ship with no “real” (read: printed) documentation, at least by my exalted standards. It was to ship with a beautifully written 150 page starter guide (starter guide? 150 pages? Yes. VB was a massive product by that time, and it’s much bigger now). That wasn’t good enough for Tom Campbell, Visual Basic Program Manager and Unelected Customer Advocate. Our studies showed that virtually no one used Microsoft’s printed docs, other than third-party publishers who were smart enough to use them as the basis for the bloated, shelf-threatening, tree-killing $30 books that were the rage in bookstores for so many years. This was back before you could get so much awesome content on the net.
So here’s who liked printed documentation. Savvy third-party publishers, me, and a few vocal users. Emphasize “few” and “vocal”. These were the good people I decided to champion, despite clear internal survey results showing that the average customer didn’t care whether we shipped 10 pounds of books with Visual Basic. (Riddle me this. After getting their $1500 VB Enterprise shipped to them they would then go out to Barnes & Noble, expense 15 pounds of generally inferior third party books that rehashed with a higher signal to noise ratio Microsoft’s own docs, and trundle happily back to their cubicle. Answer: WTF? I wonder to this day.)
In team meetings as VB neared release I harangued the product team about the absolute importance of printed documentation, how great a job Microsoft did at it, and how cheesy it would be not to include it with a product with such high perceived value. The sales guys finally cut a deal with me. We’d include a coupon for free printed documentation in the VB packaging. Microsoft even paid for shipping if you redeemed the coupon. I think I crusaded for that one too.
I might mention here that the VB team had incredible technical writers. Microsoft’s programming tools documentation has always been severely underrated, a tradition that continues to this day. I still think it’s a secret weapon no other company can match, and one of the unstated reasons programmers stay with Microsoft. Even within Microsoft this was not well understood, with (I think), an undesirable ripple effect I’ll discuss another time.
Printed manuals, though? Not a high priority with Microsoft’s users. A year after the VB5 was released I asked the sales guys how the coupon deal went. “Disaster,” they said cheerfully, to their credit not pinning on me the blame I so richly deserved. “No one ever redeems those things. We have a warehouse full of books we don’t know what to do with.”
Here are the takeaways.
- Feel free to listen to your customers. They spoke. I didn’t listen. I then negotiated against my own employer on their behalf, benefiting no one.
- Next time you imagine Microsoft as a cold, faceless, uncaring entity, remember they went to enormous expense to do the right thing for the customers because of one guy’s speechifying, even though they had plenty of evidence that guy was wrong.
- Enough with the rosettes.