After Bill Gates on July 18, Stephen Ballmer sent me an e-mail today. OK, I was not the only recipient. Maybe we were a million. Anyway, what Microsoft's CEO has to tell me?
First of all, he gave us a little background on his past. After all, he's one of our personal friends...
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.
Of course, he wouldn't be that rich if he didn't join Microsoft.
Now, let's go to the real subject: the use of Microsoft Error Reporting to eliminate bugs.
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. [..] 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.
This is nice: put the blame on users.
So what to do to fix these pesky bugs?
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.
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. [..]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.
Bravo! Microsoft finally is discovering one of the laws that practically govern all human activities: the so-called 80/20.
Irony aside, I have one question for Microsoft: is this small percentage fixed? According to what we see for almost a month regarding all versions of Word, I have some doubts. [If you don't know what I'm talking about, a summary is available from TechWeb: Are Your Word Documents Bugged?]
Let's come back to Ballmer's e-mail.
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.
If I read this correctly, this means that Microsoft released this software, knowing that 26% of the bugs found by testers were not fixed. A good way to build trust...
I'm sure that lots of lawyers and PR people read this memo before it was sent. And they approved it. Amazing!
Source: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corporation, October 2, 2002
6:04:10 PM Permalink
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