John Lam on Software

Happiness == simplicity

We’re in the final steps of our move. On Thursday, we moved our stuff into our new house in Redmond, and we’re getting ready to move my family into the house this afternoon.

The experience of buying the house, getting things setup the way we wanted, and the design of the house were all really amazing. We purchased our home from a small developer, and we were personally taken care of by the folks whose signatures were on the bottom line of their construction loan.

There was zero bureaucracy, the service was exceptional, and the design of the home itself really exceeded all of my expectations. The house itself continues to surprise me with details that make me smile. Some are little things like the placement of outlets exactly where I needed them. Other things were more significant like the use of a radiant heating system. This house is silent; there isn’t the cycling of a central blower kicking off every so often to let you know that the heat is on.

Perhaps the best thing was knowing that the developer was treating us like people, and taking care of the small details that make our life easier. For example, I realized yesterday that I hadn’t signed up for hydro and gas hookups. At our last new house you were welcomed to our new home by a nasty little sign on our front door that said ‘you have 3 days to sign up for a gas/electric/hydro account or we’re turning it off!’ When I saw one of our home developers yesterday, she just smiled and said ‘all taken care of’.

Now, let’s contrast this experience with the move of our household goods. Let me see, there’s a move coordinator who liaises with Microsoft, a move insurance coordinator, 2 overall move coordinators, 1 local move consultant in Toronto, 1 local coordinator in Toronto, another local coordinator in Redmond, 5 crew members in Toronto, 5 crew members in Redmond, a driver, an emergency service guy, and a coordinator for the emergency service guy. And that’s just for the household goods. There were probably another 10 people involved in moving our cars.

Each individual that I worked with on this move (with a few exceptions) was very well trained and very professional. However, when things inevitably went wrong, nobody was accountable to me. People were far more concerned about satisfying the bureaucracy rather than doing the right thing for the customer.

An example of this behavior occurred on Thursday when we discovered that they had lost some parts for a few things that were disassembled for the move. Ben’s crib was missing two screws and a caster wheel. This justified an emergency service call for the following day. By the time the service guy arrived the next day, I had discovered a bunch of other parts that were missing from other pieces of furniture. He agreed to go pick up those other parts from the hardware store in addition to the parts for the crib.

Somewhere during the day, his supervisor called him (not me) discovered the ‘unauthorized parts purchases’ and made him return them to the store! These were parts that amounted to $20 or so. This decision apparently involved 3 or 4 people. To add insult to injury, the parts that he purchased didn’t fit (even though I had him bring an identical screw from another part of the crib to avoid mistakes like this), so he had to go get more parts – and he never came back.

Now, I’m not sure what is more complicated – building a house that exceeds customer expectations, or moving a household full of stuff from one country to another. But what is clear is that one person needs to be the go-to person for customer contact and happiness not a random person of the day who is a slave to process. The reason why the developer exceeded expectations was the single point of contact and accountability for all things related to our new house. The reason why the moving company barely met expectations* was the fact that I was directly exposed to the complexity of the move process myself.

Don’t expose your customers to your process. Customers don’t care about your process. Instead, make someone accountable to your customers and have them work with your bureaucracy, and make sure that they have the power to make things happen.

Or better yet, if you’re upset with how you’re being treated, vote with your dollars and pick someone who will work more directly with you (sometimes much easier said than done though).

* Overall it was a good move – only 3 or 4 small things were broken, and a few parts are AWOL.

Microsoft and Grad School Part 2

When I was in grad school in the early 90’s, the world was a much different place. If you wanted to discuss your research results, the only people you could meaningfully discuss those results with were your supervisor or other members of your department / network (talking with random people on the street wasn’t very helpful). This restriction was largely one of necessity since the web was largely a novelty in those days.

There were, however, ‘business reasons’ for this as well. Sometimes you were competing with other groups around the world, and publication means everything in academia. So by necessity there would be some degree of secrecy around results from research. However, once publication has been established (e.g. paper submitted for publication), then scientists turn into a really chatty bunch of people who are eager to share their results in a very ‘open source’ fashion.

Which brings me back to Microsoft. Around here, it’s common to think of the Strategy Tax, although most folks that I talk to don’t refer to it by that name. Regardless of what you work on, at some point you have to think about how it relates back to the platform, or other teams that are working in the same markets as you are. These things are purely business-related things that come back to how you justify your (continued) existence. If you think of Microsoft as a VC company that funds different groups based on their ideas and their results, then you’ll have a better model of how Microsoft works.

Which brings me back to my work at Microsoft. We’re paying the strategy tax right now with our silence. Folks around here really like to make announcements about the future direction of our platform at big developer-focused events like MIX and PDC. Once these events happen, it’s the equivalent of ‘publishing’ in academia. At this point, you’ll start seeing a lot of technical posts about what we’re doing both from myself and others on my team.

I can’t wait …

Microsoft is like grad school

I’m having a blast here at Microsoft. The last time I had this much fun was in grad school. The hallway and lunch conversations are excellent – it’s great to be around so many smart folks.

Just the other day I went to the equivalent of a departmental colloquium. One of the devs on the CLR team gave an excellent description of how the debugging interfaces of the CLR work. In all of my time outside of the company, I’d never heard such a concise description of managed debugging, nor did I truly appreciate the challenges involved in implementing first class debugging support on the CLR.

There’s also vast intranet. You can spend months just reading interesting papers. Now that I’ve got RAS access to corpnet, I’m spending some time each evening just reading. The opportunities for personal growth here are remarkable.

While I definitely underestimated the logistical challenges involved in moving to Redmond, I’m not regretting it one bit. Slowly but surely things are coming together – our house closed in Toronto today, and we’re putting together an offer for our new house in Redmond tomorrow. Life is good.