Chris Lanier, Here It Is: My Thoughts on Vista Media Center:

This brings me to another point which has nothing to do with Vista, but Microsoft needs more transparency with its Media Center team. Since Matt Goyer it’s been very quiet. Of course, working on Vista should be Microsoft’s top priority, but anyone from the Media Center team reading this I would like to see you start blogging. Media Center has a growing community behind it, we need transparency with some of the issues and features that we (the community) feel you should be providing.

I am torn about what to write here. As you all know I occasionally blogged about Media Center and the digital living space. I also had a few co-workers who blogged about Media Center and Media Center’s development platform. Now, I can’t speak for the others, but I blogged because I wanted to. No one asked me to. It was just something I did, but it was not something explicity supported or encouraged by eHome management. Several times I did get e-mails asking to remove something and several times I got quite upset about blogging embargos even though the features had been disclosed (CES 06). But other than that I blogged and no one really cared (except the 1000 visitors a day who visited here :) ).

If you’re a beta newsgroup participant you will also notice that Media Center has lots of newsgroups and our beta co-ordinators spend lots of time and energy encouraging you to post. But how engaged was the Media Center team in the newsgroups? About as engaged as they were with blogging. Which means to say that aside from a one or two program managers who geniuely loved posting either to newsgroups or blogs no one else contributed. (Note to CWilli: You still owe me a gift certificate :) ).

But I’ll be honest. It’s hard to keep to keep up with the community. It’s something I’m passionate about and unfortunately when you’re expected to work 45+ hours a week on a project it’s hard to find the extra 5+ hours a week to seriously engage in community transparency through blogging, the newsgroups, or enthusiast sites like the Green Button. Though on the other hand the Media Center team has 40+ program managers. Surely between that many people there are enough people passionate about blogging that they can make it one of their core objectives. All you really need is one or two good bloggers per product group to make a difference in the community.

However, when I think about the investment not being made in blogging by eHome PMs I think about the investments they make in other areas. One that comes to mind is usability. eHome invests a lot of PM time and energy in usability studies. Now the PMs don’t really setup and run the studies, because eHome has dedicated usability engineers who do that, but it’s highly encouraged for PMs to attend the usability studies for their areas. But these studies that can soak up hours and hours of time (each session is usually two hours). Now they certainly get a lot out of those studies but if they traded off attending a few usability sessions for quality community time, their time investment would be the same but they would have a larger pay off through the added gain in transparency and a much larger audience reach.

Though of course one difference is that Microsoft usability participants are heavily NDA’d while they certainly can’t require that of their blog readers. But maybe Microsoft is too secretive? I certainly had to make a switch at my new job when I was working on a design and the CEO said to just e-mail it out to a bunch of customers to see what they had to say. And in my mind I’m like ‘but how do we know they fit our target personas?’, ‘have they signed NDA’s?’, ‘how will we compensate them for time?’, etc. Needless to say I spent twenty minutes writing an e-mail and by the next day already had a good number of responses back.

Where does that leave us? It leaves me thinking that unless either senior leadership in the eHome organization decide that blogging is important or a few random team members step up out of the goodness of their heart (Aaron Stebner is a rockstar blogger for the MCE dev community), the community outreach is going to suffer. (I was going to recommend how they implement a proper blogging strategy but first we’d have to have a discussion on how they need to re-factor their release plans).

But hey, Media Center is at least 1000x more transparent than Windows Media Player :).