Archive for the &;Microsoft-Vista&; Category
Microsoft Presents Its BestFace
May 16, 2007
WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is a hard-core technology event. The attendees are mostly engineers from hardware companies (and a few freelance geeks) building devices around Microsoft products like the Vista operating system, which Bill Gates says has sold 40 million copies. (I&;m still waiting for my promised free Vista upgrade from HP 5 months after I bought my new PC; HP customer service is right down there with Dell.)
I missed most of Gates&; presentation, but I did catch one by one of Microsoft&;s unsettlingly young and poised product managers. He was talking about Rally, which Mary Jo Foley calls &;a set of networking protocols and licenses designed to simplify consumers&;abilities to connect peripherals to Windows Vista and to each other.&;
The presenter was a techie, presenting to a techie audience&;yet he took the time to create and go through a slide explaining arcane Rally terms and acronyms like Windows Connect Now (WCN) and Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS).
In our media training program, we call this &;when in doubt, spell it out.&; Too often, speakers cannot resist the urge to do an &;information dump&; on their audience, who won&;t understand the jargon, acronyms or internal Kool-Aid that company spokespeople have been drinking. And when an audience doesn&;t understand, they won&;t ask for clarification; who wants to lose face?
So kudos to Microsoft for understanding this and enhancing communications with their target audience. But don&;t rest on your laurels: twenty thirty years of media training has almost brought forth a kindler, gentler Bill 2.0.
Posted in bill-gates, Media Training, Microsoft, Microsoft-Rally, Microsoft-Vista, technology-journalism, WinHEC | Leave a Comment &;