Perf and Paulsc - New comment on Stirring the Microsoft Comment Pot on a Rainy Wee....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Stirring the Microsoft Comment Pot on a Rainy Wee...":

Mini - See, we DID learn a few important things about the performance team. A) They don't like customer feedback B) Some of them are VERY angry (he resorted to personal attacks since he didn't care to address the user feedback).

Hi paul, it's me again! :) Since I choose not to respond with my name, I'm sure as hell not going to contact you internally. I've found that most managers aren't really as open to feedback as they'd like you to believe. I don't need senior management on your side putting the brakes on my career just because they didn't like what I said.

I choose to remain anonymous, but that doesn't mean that my feedback isn't honest. My posts are not based off my emotion. They are based off actual customer feedback that I have reviewed. You're wrong if you think I'm just flaming you or the technologies that you work on. If you aren't open to customer feedback, I'll keep that in mind the next time your team tries to push some new initiative down my throat.

Regarding features from the performance team hurting the sales of Vista:

"Says you. This is just wrong on its face. We are supposed to accept this unsubstantiated
statement from some anonymous guy on a blog? "

You can read almost any review and see a mention of the *huge* amount of RAM used. Check out the
blogs/newsgroups/web forums where early adopters and tech purchase influencers hang out. It's
mentioned in all of those places. A LOT. And it's starting to turn from "on my machine, Vista
uses ALL OF MY RAM!!! OMG!!!!1111" to "a friend of my buddy said he tried vista but it needed
too much ram and stuff". These are the people that obviously DO tell two friends (and so on...).

I'm sure if you took a poll internally and asked people what where the top 5 most common
complaints that they had heard/read about Vista, the RAM "requirements" will be on a large percentage of those lists.

To clarify, it's not me saying the Vista is a pig. It is some of our customers.

regarding WEI being used by salespeople to sell new machines:

"Hmmm...so it does move more machines after all. Doesn't this contradict what you just said in the paragraph above? "

No, it doesn't. The salespeople are using the WEI numbers to fool a small number of uneducated customers. There are still a substantial number of people who are staying away from Vista because of the bad things they
are hearing/reading about it (with the big blocker being the RAM "requirement").

"Why don't you try typing "Windows Experience Index" into a search engine and read about it for yourself? "

Sounds like you can't answer this question then. Ok, thanks.

I hope we'll start seeing it on games later this year.

"People should have achievable goals, and there is always room for growth. We can update the scale anytime we want."

So what you're suggesting is to aim low with your goals. I guess that's the problem with Microsoft in a nutshell. I'll keep this in mind for my MYCD, and hope that my boss thinks like you do.

This would be like our sales staff having a goal to sell 100,000 copies of Vista. Sure, that's an
achievable goal. But it's one that was met prior to RTM. That's not really much of a stretch.

If you can update it whenever you want, what are you waiting for? You don't see a need to allow
for higher end machines to have some differentiation?

regarding readyboost and Vista performance with 512MB of RAM:

"Because you say so? I don't think so. We have plenty of hard data that says otherwise. Rants on
a blog by anonymous posters are cheap."

Geez, now I need to feed the troll. You go search now: "Readyboost benchmarks" for one search and "Vista and 512MB of RAM" for the other.

(Even I have had enough of the back and forth now.)