Microsoft to Open Retail Stores

Microsoft this week has talked openly about opening Retail Stores and even hired a seasoned Retail exec to lead the effort. From WSJ.com:

Microsoft Corp. said it hired a former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executive to help the company open its own retail stores, a strategy shift that borrows from the playbook of rival Apple Inc.

The Redmond, Wash., company said it hired David Porter, most recently the head of world-wide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG, as corporate vice president of retail stores for Microsoft.

In a statement, Microsoft said the first priority of Mr. Porter, who is also a 25-year veteran of Wal-Mart, will be to define where to place the Microsoft stores and when to open them. A Microsoft spokesman said the company's current plans are for a "small number" of stores.

Microsoft has been quick to state the purpose of these stores which is to build brand and connect with consumers directly unlike Apple which opened stores more for Distribution (although I think Apple stores drive brand experience the best). Microsoft Pri0 blog had Robbie Bach, head of the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division stating the same:

Q: Can you give us your thoughts on moving into retail? You guys have a lot of important partners, especially who resell products from your [Entertainment and Devices Division]...

Bach: "The way you have to put this in context is you have to think of it as just a natural evolution of what's going on in the market and it's a natural evolution of what's going on as we develop our brand.

"And I don't think -- I saw some of the commentary that this was designed to be the same as Apple or whatever. You should think about it, I think, quite differently.

"Apple's approach was about distribution. People forget that when they entered their stores [in 2001], this was quite a while ago, they didn't have distribution for Macintoshes, so they created their own distribution.

"We have plenty of distribution. These stores for us are about building our connection to customers, about building our brand presence and about reaching out and understanding what works and what improves the selling experience.

"So Apple you would think of as a volume distribution play. You should think of ours as much more of a brand and customer relationship investment more than anything else."

My take, this is great news coming from Microsoft. Microsoft few know have a very strong Retail Industry Practice where they have been working with various partners and have just launched the Retail Experience Center which blends, Microsoft's merchandising strategies as a consumer goods company and its solution capabilities as a technology provider for the retail industry.

This knowledge and a proof of concept store means a lot for the Microsoft Retail initiative. Think about the possibilities of Surface tables, Windows 7 with it’s Multi-touch features on big LCDs and Interactive Shopping Carts. Think about Store assistants telling you product features by keeping the product on the table which reads the tags and builds a rich interactive experience on the table. The only thing Microsoft should be wary of and will need is Execution and I am sure Microsoft would be working on that. They would learn from Apple Stores success and apply their own Retail Practice knowledge to make this a killer retail store, something we have so far only dreamt of and seen as Proof of Concepts only.

MSN Wonderwall (and why I like it)

MSN has launched Wonderwall, a site which will pull content from other MSN channels and concentrates on Celebrities and ofcourse gossip.

You can read about the launch in the Microsoft press release or some coverage on All Things Digital and PaidContent. I think PaidContent got it right more than anybody.

Wonderwall exemplifies the latest rage in portal strategy—a site that can stand alone with its own brand while feeding from and feeding into the portal.

 

To most, it looks like MSN is playing catchup. Not so, argues MSN GM Rob Bennett, who contends that Wonderwall provides a single destination for content scattered across MSN, not something completely new. “The reality is a lot of the same content and the same audience is there.” That lack of a single destination is “why it looks like we’re further behind than we probably are.” Bennett expects the promotional power of MSN to help Wonderwall catch up fast: ” I think when we turn the firehose on in different places; it’s going to be a close race.” MSN also has an off-network campaign in the works.

Which is exactly what it is, a strategy to push content from and to MSN and in a way which creates value for Users (central place for all celebrity news/gossip) and Advertisers (more targetable audience at the same place). MSN has great content and if they are able to mix it well with programming and keep it fresh (and they have help in the form of BermanBraun), they will have a winner. One look at the site and you can see the enormous advertising opportunities the site provides. And as far as I understand, users and Advertisers love such stuff. For each click on the celebrity photograph on the wall you have one opportunity to show highly targetable ad. Throw in some research surveys and analysis and the site brings more value to the advertisers.

Good Job MSN.

The Establishment blocks Facebook & MySpace

Guess Politicians are the same everywhere. I have every reason to say, this is India 2012-2015 when our own politicians will hopefully have Facebook profiles :). 

Now Social Networking sites need to worry not just about competition but THE Establishment too.

Maryland General Assembly Blocks Facebook, MySpace

"With the beginning of the 2009 Legislative Session, we have observed a significant increase in viruses and malware affecting the Maryland General Assembly computers," the Office of Legislative Information Systems Director Michael Gaudiello wrote to staff on Thursday, according to Legum's New Line. "After several weeks of analysis, we have determined that many of the infecting programs are originating from pages hosted on www.facebook.com and www.myspace.com."

That's not all. The IT department intends to continue its investigation and ban other sites determined to be "problematic."

Has Gaudiello ever heard of anti-virus software? Banning Facebook and MySpace clearly doesn't solve the problem of viruses, as many, many sites can install malware. And, clearly, many lawmakers find social networking sites useful for spreading messages to the people they represent.

Back from Blog hiatus

Notwithstanding, I have not been able to blog here for quite some time. Have been busy at work mostly. Lots of interesting things happening at work and that has been taking most of my time. Anyways, am rethinking on how to take this blog forward. At work a lot of what I am engaged in these days involves Media related work so you will see a lot of Media related posts too. As always, a considerable amount of will be on Microsoft, Google and other online, media companies. Have said the following words many times before too, I hope and wish this time for good.

Stay tuned…

Failed Opportunity – An example

Talking of failed opportunities, I read this news on NYTimes of a new Website called Cookstr. Cookstr plans to “showcase the recipes of star chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Mario Batali, as well as those of less-well-known but highly regarded cookbook writers. The idea, ultimately, is to sell copies of these authors’ books”.

Now this news appeared on the NYTimes which had 20 M Unique Users in September. Anyone would have kept their site ready for the traffic the news will bring to their site and they could have 1000’s (even millions) of conversions just because of this coverage. But Not Cookstr. While the news article does say, that the site will go live this month, you would assume that Cookstr would have done their research on NYTimes readership and would have been ready to showcase their new site to millions of readers. This is what you see when you are taken to the website.

Now, my dear readers (yes the two of you) that’s a classic example of Failed Opportunity.

Another reason to use Live.com

While the Live Search has improved drastically in the past few months, Microsoft now has one more reason to have more people using Live Search. The photographs from Olympics (available in US and few other countries only at this time). The images are amazing and very well placed.

Starbucks Economics

[via Aplia Econ Blog]

Rather old article, but nonetheless fascinating if you are interested in Economics.

Starbucks Economics - Solving the mystery of the elusive "short" cappuccino.

Can Do/Will Do Evaluation

While developing Competency Models for my groups, one of the popular performance analysis tools that I have come across is the Can Do/Will Do Evaluation chart that Kenneth Carlton Cooper has described in his book, Effective Competency Modeling and Reporting: A Step-by-Step Guide for Improving Individual and Organizational Performance. Below is a representation of the same.

Here “Can do” refers to employee’s qualification to do the job and “Will do” refers to employee’s motivation to perform. The results are four alternatives:

• Can Do/Will Do - Ideal Situation. The employee is fully qualified and doing the job as desired. The Manager should motivate and incentivize the employee suitably.
• Can't Do/Will Do - In this case, employee is willing to put in the efforts but is ill equipped skill wise to do the job. This suggests a competency gap and Training will help in this case.
• Can Do/Won't Do - In this case, employee has all required competencies to complete the job but still is not performing the job as desired. This shows a Motivational problem and counseling will help in this case.
• Can't Do/Won't Do - In this case, the employee is lacking in both skills and motivation. Employer needs to weigh the options of counseling the employee versus the success of such counseling. The result could be Job in Jeopardy situation. As Kenneth Cooper notes in his book, Attitudes cannot be developed, only counseled.

It is interesting to note that Can Do/Can't Do dimension of this model is competency based while Will Do/Won't Do is not since it involves dealing with motivational attitude.

Competency Management

One of my colleagues, Hemant Sathe has started his new blog through which he plans to share his experiences in technology and project management. Now Hemant and I have worked very closely in the recent past and so I am quite familiar with the topic of his latest post, Thoughts on building technical competency. This is an area where we have focused a lot in the last year or so. Let me run you through how we run the Competency Management program for our group. As Hemant has put out, we look at Competency development as a multi-step process. The step 1 is what we termed the Gap Analysis. Quoting Hemant on the same:

In the first step, we collected data about our existing competencies. The way to do that was to identify three top most relevant competencies of each of our team members. This also included the project leads and middle management. The focus was on "relevant skills". This meant that if someone had worked extensively on a particular technology some 2-3 years back we may not consider it in top 3. We rated the skills on a level of E1 to E4. Then we also mapped the target levels of each of these competencies in the current project or quarter or half year. Although we collected data from the teams, it was validated by the leads to reflect the usable level of the skills.

Once we did this analysis, we started analyzing the data and listing the E3 onwards level employees. These were called as the champions of the skill area. This list is useful in few key business areas; recruitment, training, responding to proposals, estimation, solving problems of projects, knowledge management.

Along with identifying the champions, we also identified the laggards who are bringing down the whole competency level average for the group. We then looked at their past year's performance assessments and decided relevant competency levels they need to attain to stay in the group.

The next step in the process is Competency Upgrades. Now, this is the area where we did a lot and lot remains to be done. Some of the things we did right included,

• Generating Quarterly training needs - This was done in liaison with Learning and Development (L&D) group. What it meant was coming up with the group needs based on the different competency levels and how we wanted to move people across these. Start of the quarter, you hand over the training needs for the entire group to the L&D team and work with them to schedule/conduct the training's. This helped L&D team to plan for the training in a better way and avoid ad-hoc requests which generally had very less lead time to close.
• Strong Induction Programs - As a part of Induction we included few checkpoints. We interviewed and took test of all Trainees who joined the group. Since most of the desired competencies in our group required strong OOPS, Data Structures background, we made sure that we get people who are from Computer Science and IT education backgrounds. The Induction was also streamlined and we are now having almost 30 person days of Induction training. During this induction we have started assigning mentors to the new joinees so that they have somebody to talk to understand the work our group is involved with. Generally these mentors are from project groups where these new people will join. For experienced people, the induction is of lesser time as we recruit by identifying the competencies that we want in the new joining person(s). In this case also we have a strict Interview process which is championed by the E3+ level employees as Hemant mentioned in his post.
• Certifications Tracking - This is another area we encouraged our employees in and are tracking this closely. There is a schedule which allows us to find out who is undergoing which certification in the next quarter. Some cool corporate initiatives like free certification drives and exam fee reimbursements helped our employees to go for the same without any fear of failures.
• Knowledge Sharing Sessions - As Hemant points out,

  Our main focus last year was on conduction knowledge sharing sessions (KSS). For these KSS we had different types. These were,
  - Formal training/ presentation on a technology area
  - Workshops for areas like design
  Hands on sessions
  - Project showcase to demonstrate the in-house skills and build a sense of pride

  
  

  KSS went well for some time and then it started fizzling out for various reasons (including busy schedules, laggards outweighing front-runners, lesser incentives for the Knowledge sharers etc) but we are determined to make it happen. The importance of KSS is enormous and apart from what Hemant described, we want to do well because KSS sessions are a great step forward to improve Employee communication and presentation skills. This is so important in today's world with such great focus on outsourcing and working globally. 

The next steps will include the following:

• Competency Assessment - We are assessing the employees by their performance in various projects, customer satisfaction surveys and various feedback mechanisms (peer and manager, half-yearly and yearly assessments etc). Also, we are planning to assess the competencies by engaging employees in different role plays working individually and in groups.
• Incentivizing the whole thing. Some people will do all this because they will realize this as important to their career progression but not all fingers are equal, right :) We need to come up with different mechanisms to incentivize the ones who are the front-runners so that others also follow their lead.
• Another thing we are doing is linking various sub group level competencies with the strategic focus of the group. Say for example, we expect to do business in forthcoming .NET 3.0 technologies like WPF, SilverLight, WCF etc while we currently are doing a lot of work in .NET 2.0 space. So in this case, we align each sub-group to the strategic intent of the complete group. What this will mean is that the chosen sub-groups will participate in the new training programs that we conduct.

Are we doing the right things? Are there any laid out processes we need to look at? How are you all managing Competency Development and Management in your orgs?

Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo

Some great news coming out today.

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. offered to buy search engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion in cash and stock in a move to boost its competitive edge in the online services market.

Microsoft bid $31 per share for Yahoo, representing a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's closing stock price Thursday.

Now, this is what I call Breaking News :)

Happy New Year 2008

Reflecting on the year gone by (2007), it has been quite some year for me professionally what with so many prizes/awards (1st prize for Collaborative Logistics Mashup for Mashup Idea and Assembly, 1st Prize in the wireless competition for the Connected Services Sandbox, 1st prize for Session Search CSF competition and the overall Series winner). All these awards came with good prize money so even more rewarding :)

This year lady luck smiled on me even in quizzes with me and my partner Abha Shah coming runners up in the Pune Tata Crucible. We could have been the winners if we were a little faster with our fingers in the buzzer round. A good commentary of the same is on Jay's blog (Abha's husband). Last year, 2006 I had come 3rd in Pune round of Tata Crucible.Then there were few awards at my Company level, Best Speaker award, Innovation award (which I am very proud of).

Professionally, my wife Monica also has been doing great with she delivering successfully one of the biggest projects in the company. She now moves on to take higher responsibilities.

I hope Lady luck stays with us the next year too and enriches us both professionally and personally. Hope the same for all the readers of my blog. A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year !!

Mixx no match for Digg (so far)

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch Digg Refugees may be heading to Mixx. I don't quite understand what he means by Refugees but anyways, what I pointed out in this post was how Mixx is an upcoming Social Digging site and how Digg is way ahead of Mixx right now.

Below is the list of top media news websites which allow their stories to be shared using community-based popularity websites like Digg, Reddit etc.

Site	Digg	Reddit	Mixx
The New York Times	Yes	No	No
MSNBC	Yes	No	No
CNN	Yes	Yes	No
Reuters	Yes	No	Yes
Washington Post	Yes	Yes	No
Guardian	Yes	Yes	No
WSJ	Yes	No	No
Portfolio.com	Yes	Yes	No
ABC News	Yes	Yes	No
Fox News	Yes	No	No

 

Now as you can see, except for Reuters no other big Media/News websites allow their stories to be dug directly by Mixx. Support for Mixx is miniscule as compared to Digg and that is what gets reflected from the stats too.

HealthVault - Platform Service Offering from Microsoft

Ray Ozzie's Software+Services strategy seems to be taking shape. During the 2007 Financial Analysts Meeting he spoke of platform approach to services. To quote him verbatim (emphasis mine),

Services is going to be a critical aspect of all of our offerings from Windows and Office on the client to Exchange and SharePoint and Dynamics and other things on the server, and in order to gain leverage across all of our offerings, we're taking a platform approach to services, giving each of our products the common benefits of cost, speed, scale and monetization that a platform approach offers….

We're building a platform to support our own apps and solutions, and to support our partners' applications and solutions, and to support enterprise solutions and enterprise infrastructure. We are the only company in the industry that has the breadth of reach from consumer to enterprises to understand and deliver and to take full advantage of the services opportunity in all of these markets.  

With HealthVault, Microsoft has done exactly that. From the press release:

Microsoft^® HealthVault, a software and services platform aimed at helping people better manage their health information. The company outlined its vision for ways that HealthVault can bring the health and technology industries together to create new applications, services and connected devices that help people manage and monitor their personal health information, including weight loss and disease management, such as for diabetes.

What's exciting is that since it's a Platform service, it is already augmented by other Live Services such as Live Search (in this case, Live Search Health), Live Id etc. Also, with the HealthVault SDK, Microsoft has made the service extensible by developers, ISV's and Partners.

For more on Software + Services aspect of HealthVault, read the blog post by Dan Kasum

Live ID: Core of Microsoft's Online Services Push

Over the weekend, I read and re-read all the transcripts from Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2007. While few things stood out like focus on Software + Services, next era of Consumer Electronics, Microsoft Services Platform (see Ray Ozzie's presentation) etc, Kevin Johnson's talk on Online Services and Advertising, more particularly discussion on Live ID's took my attention. According to Kevin, Microsoft has 380 million active (user that signs in and uses one or more of our services every 30 days) Live IDs and these are driving the breadth of usage of Microsoft (Live) Services.

There are four key things that are important. Live IDs in these services are sticky. People sign on and they use these services because it's about contacts that are important to them, data that's important to them, information and their profile in services that they use that's important to individuals. So it's a very sticky service.

Number two, it's revenue monetization. We can drive what I call direct revenue per live ID, the display ads or the in-screen videos or the searches done from these services as well as indirect revenue for Live ID. Indirect revenue per Live ID is as they come into the network, our ability to route traffic and flow them to other services, other parts of the network creates another revenue monetization opportunity.

So you have two things, sticky users, and you've got revenue production. Direction revenue for Live ID, indirect revenue for Live ID. Third, it enables ad serving. This creates significant amount of opportunity for us to know more about the users when they are signed in versus just a cookie or an IP address. As users are signed in, we can do a better job of behavioral targeting or ad targeting to these particular users, which is good for the user, more relevant advertising, and it's good for the advertiser. It's more targeted at the audience they're trying to get after.

And we have some momentum coming out of fiscal year '07. We grew Live IDs in fiscal year '07 by over 20 percent to get to that 380 million. Where are we going in fiscal year '08? The next release of Windows Live will be coming out this fall. It is a suite of user services, a single suite of user services. A single download, single download and install to the PC that will enable users to use these services whether they're on the PC, on the phone, or just directly from browser to Internet. A very rich set of services.

This next release of Windows Live is the must-have free upgrade to the Windows experience. And so we're going to drive very hard on continuing to expand the number of users we have using these Windows Live services. Let me give you some perspective. We're at 380 million Live IDs. We're getting ready to release this next release of Windows Live in the fall. Yahoo is about 245 million active registered users; Google has approximately 75 million signed-in users.

Our ability as a company to better connect to the Windows experiences such as mail, Photo Gallery, as well as the experience on the phone and extend those into services experiences, I think, will enable us to expand Live IDs and really grow our reach in the network. So that's one key priority our engineering teams are focused on, our marketing teams, our field teams.

The core thing to note here would be more relevant advertising that Microsoft is targeting based on the knowledge of who the Live ID user is. This is where Microsoft has edge on Google. Google while having more number of users using it's Search services, have not really paid much heed to getting to know it's users and have relied on using IP address and search terms to target ads/services. Knowing Live ID user can open enormous opportunities for Microsoft to target ads to the users. Consider this fictitious (soon to be real) scenario, Your friend X bought a pair of Nike shoes and when you search for shoes on Live.com, Microsoft using Windows Live Contact services has identified your friend and will in return show you the same shoe telling you this is what your friend bought. You wanna buy that? :) How cool would that be.

Collab+Logistics on DDJ

It's an honor to have been interviewed by Dr. Dobb's Journal. Dr. Dobb's journal interviewed me on the Collaborative Logistics Mashup win at Connected Services Sandbox Mashup Service Design competition. You can read the interview here:

Mashups: Networks for Collaborative Logistics