Oct. 2, 2002
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how Microsoft can do a better
job of serving its customers. I'm convinced that we need to do more to
establish and maintain broad connections with the millions of people who
use our products and services around the world. We need to more thoroughly
understand their needs, how they use technology, what they like about it,
and what they don't. I'd like to share with you some of what we've
recently begun to do and are planning for in the future to better connect
with our customers.
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email. This is one in an occasional series of mails that Bill Gates and I,
and periodically other Microsoft executives, will be sending to people who
are interested in hearing from us about technology and public-policy
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everyone who cares about the future of high technology. This is part of
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Software and Snack Food
In my career, I've worked at only one other place besides Microsoft. I
marketed brownie mix and blueberry muffin mix for one of the largest
consumer products companies. I'm glad I decided to join Microsoft 22 years
ago, when it was a little software startup, but I have great admiration
for successful consumer businesses, and I believe Microsoft can learn from
them. Behind the leading brands are companies that really know their
customers. These firms devote a great deal of time and energy to gaining
an intimate understanding of consumers, their reactions to every aspect of
products, and how those products fit into their lives. Even so, not every
new grocery or drug-store item succeeds. But by using the huge volume of
data that feeds back from the daily purchase decisions of millions of
consumers, marketers manage over time to figure out what consumers want in
cake mix, soft drinks, shampoo, and so on. And these same products often
go on satisfying consumers for decades.
Satisfying customers is what it's all about with technology products,
too. And customers expect the same high quality and reliability in
computing devices and software as they do in consumer products. But
meeting their expectations is much harder, and not just because
information technology is more complex and interdependent. The challenge
has more to do with the flexibility of technology and its continual, rapid
advance. To take advantage of this and expand what people can do with
hardware and software, computer products must constantly evolve. As a
result, products are seldom around long enough in one form to be fully
time-tested, let alone perfected. And customers continually come up with
new uses for their technology, new combinations and configurations that
further complicate technology companies' efforts to ensure a satisfying
experience, free of hiccups and glitches.
If technology products are to approach the satisfying consistency of
consumer staples - and clearly they should - then we in the industry need
a more detailed knowledge of customers' experiences with our products. We
must do a better job of connecting with customers. For a company such as
Microsoft, with many millions of customers around the world, the
connections must be very broad. While we are working to deepen our
relationships with enterprise and other business customers, we also need
to make innumerable, daily connections with the very wide array of people
who use our products - consumers, information workers, software developers
and information technology professionals.
In the past year, we specifically identified some near-term objectives
on the road to further product improvements and greater customer
satisfaction. Among them:
- Obtain much more feedback from our customers about their experience;
- Offer customers easier, more consistent ways to update their
products;
- Provide customers with more effective, readily available support and
service.
We have a long way to go, but we're excited about the results so far
from some of our recent efforts. I'd like to share just one great example,
and then I'll tell you how you can learn more about what we're doing along
these lines.
A New Pipeline for Customer Feedback
Let's acknowledge a sad truth about software: any code of significant
scope and power will have bugs in it. Even a relatively simple software
product today has millions of lines of code that provide many places for
bugs to hide. That's why our customers still encounter bugs despite the
rigorous and extensive stress testing and beta testing we do. With Windows
2000 and Windows XP, we dramatically improved the stability and
reliability of our platform, and we eliminated many flaws, but we did not
find all the bugs in these or other products. Nor did we find all the
software conflicts that can cause applications to freeze up or otherwise
fail to perform as expected.
The process of finding and fixing software problems has been hindered
by a lack of reliable data on the precise nature of the problems customers
encounter in the real world. Freeze-ups and crashes can be incredibly
irritating, but rarely do customers contact technical support about them;
instead, they close the program. Even when customers do call support and
we resolve a problem, we often do not glean enough detail to trace its
cause or prevent it from recurring.
To give us better feedback, a small team in our Office group built a
system that helps us gather real-world data about the causes of customers'
problems - in particular, about crashes. This system is now built into
Office, Windows, and most of our other major products, including our
forthcoming Windows .NET Servers. It enables customers to send us an error
report, if they choose, whenever anything goes wrong.
There are risks in offering this option to have software "phone home"
like E.T. One risk is that error reporting could compound a customer's
irritation over the error itself. We therefore worked hard to make
reporting simple and quick. We developed a special format, called a
"minidump," to minimize the size of the report so that it can be
transferred in a few seconds with a single mouse click.
Also, customers may wonder what we do with their reports and whether
their privacy is protected. We use advanced security technologies to help
protect these error reports, which are gathered on a cluster of dedicated
Microsoft servers and are used for no other purpose than to find and fix
bugs. Engineers look at stack details, some system information, a list of
loaded modules, the type of exception, and global and local variables.
We've been amazed by the patterns revealed in the error reports that
customers are sending us. The reports identify bugs not only in our own
software, but in Windows-based applications from independent hardware and
software vendors as well. One really exciting thing we learned is how,
among all the software bugs involved in reports, a relatively small
proportion causes most of the errors. About 20 percent of the bugs cause
80 percent of all errors, and - this is stunning to me - one percent of
bugs cause half of all errors.
With this immensely valuable feedback from our customers, we're now
able to prioritize debugging work on our products to achieve the biggest
improvement in customers' experience. And as the work proceeds based on
this new source of systematic data, the improvement will be dramatic.
Already, in Windows XP Service Pack 1, error reporting enabled us to
address 29 percent of errors involving the operating system and
applications running on it, including a large number of third-party
applications. Error reporting helped us to eliminate more than half of all
Office XP errors with Office XP Service Pack 2.
Work continues to find and fix remaining bugs in these and other
existing products, but error reporting is now also helping us to resolve
more problems before new products are released. Visual Studio .NET,
released last February, was one of our first products to benefit from the
use of error-reporting data throughout its beta testing. Error reporting
enabled us to log and fix 74 percent of all crashes reported in the first
beta version. Many other problems were caught and eliminated in subsequent
testing rounds.
And we're not keeping this great tool to ourselves. We're working with
independent hardware and software vendors to help them use our
error-reporting data to improve their products, too. Some 450 companies
have accessed our database of error reports related to their drivers,
utilities and applications. Marked decreases in some types of errors have
followed. Those involving third-party firewall software, for example, have
dropped 67 percent since the first of the year. Also, we've created
software that enables corporations to redirect error reports to their own
servers, so that administrators can find and resolve the problems that are
having the most impact on their systems.
This Is Just the Beginning
We're working to make error reporting a much more supple tool that
provides helpful information to customers while enabling us to improve
their experience in new ways. As we understand more errors, we're adding
an option for customers to go to a Web site where they can learn more
about and even fix the errors they report. In the future we want to enable
customers to look up the history of their error reports and our efforts to
resolve them. And we're trying to create easy ways for customers to send
us more nuanced feedback about their experience with our products - not
only about crashes, but also about features that don't work the way or as
easily as people would like.
Microsoft Error Reporting is just one of the ways in which we're trying
to create broader customer connections. Another is through our software
update and management services, which make it easy for customers to keep
their software current. We're also making significant changes in our
product service and support to enhance their value, and to speed the
resolution of customer problems. Soon we will commit to a new policy that
will give customers greater clarity and confidence about our support for
products through their lifecycles.
There's much more I would like to share with you about these and other
initiatives on behalf of customers, but I wanted to be (relatively) brief.
If you would like to know more, you'll find information and links to help
you drill down even further here.
Ultimately, we're trying to change how software developers do their
jobs on a daily basis. We're working to establish more of a direct,
interactive connection between developers and customers, leading to better
software and happier customers. To get there, we intend to listen even
more closely to our customers, consult with them regularly, and be more
responsive. This is the message I am sending to all of Microsoft's
employees, and it is my commitment to you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Steve Ballmer
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policies, please go to: http://www.microsoft.com/info/privacy.htm.
