This is my favorite comment over the last week:

Matt – when MS made you a PM for the MCE application – have you considered that your not the right person for the job… Come on – I dont work in the television industry but I know what dvb-c dvb-s etc are…

[cut]

Your ignorance of the rest of the world standards and wanting of features just gives the impression of a 30 something guy who has never left the west coast of the USA. There is a big world out there….

[cut]

Seriously Matt – I respect your blog, but read some forums outside of the green button and read some blogs outside of the MS ones, look at some newsgroups – either learn what the people and the community want or maybe move on to the excel team, and let someone who knows more or cares more take the reigns….

Please read my bad decision post again and then read it again, and again.

Two things. Firstly, and unfortunately I likely can’t disclose how many program managers there are who work in eHome but the number is high. Very high. I am just one of a very large number of program managers who themselves are just a portion of our technical team. This means we each have highly specialized feature areas and are somewhat insulated from other technical areas. Secondly, there are two separate teams working on Media Center. There’s the core team of which I am a member and we have absolutely nothing to do with television or television standards. Then there’s the TV team who is responsible for those things. And so, yes, if I worked on the TV team I should likely know what DVB-x is, but I don’t.

And for the record I’m twenty something and have lived on the west coast for two and half years, and I have travelled the world, but spent my time outdoors and not indoors watching TV :P.

Please remember folks I blog because I enjoy blogging. It is not a part of my job. Many of the comments I’ve read recently posted here really take my enjoyment out of sharing with you what is happening. If you want me to continue sharing please show respect to both me, my weblog, Media Center, and Microsoft.

Comments(31)

We, eHome, seem to be taking some flak in the comments here for what’s not included in Windows Vista. This reminded me of this post by Dare (and the original one by Scoble), Every Bad Decision Has a Good Reason Behind It.

For example, one thing I’ve noticed about internal mailing lists is that there are always people who seem to assume that they are smarter and more knowledgeable about a product or technology than the people who actually work on the product. You can tell these people by the way they point out obvious features that are missing in the product and berate the team for not having them.

Please remember that what you see as ‘bad decisions’ are likely not bad decisions if you saw the big picture. Of course to see that big picture you’d need to cross the fence and join eHome as an employee :). I’m not saying that we don’t make bad decisions, we certainly do (I know I’ve made one or two that made it into the product…).

Comments(3)