I have a problem.

I have a customer facing job and the distinct ability to forget someone’s name immediately after they say the final syllable. It is uncanny. Anything I can read or learn to help overcome this trait I try. Robert Scoble found this posting on “Listening to Customers” through Memeorandum. So I gave it a read. I was hoping it was an article on listening in the now and being able to retain information. Turns out the article was really about filtering who and what to listen to. Not what I hoped for but an excellent read.

The first thing I picked up was how similar the first section is to concepts in Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”. The concept of early adopters and mavens is identified very early on in the book. I think these people should be listened to very carefully, but like Ken Norton notes, “…companies have been lured to their doom by a very small, well-meaning and vocal group of power users who fooled the company…”. The early adopters don’t have all the answers. Ken goes on to talk about Middle and Late adopters and identifies some of their traits. I think he is right on the mark.

After reading the post a second time, it jolted me because I sometimes think *I* have all the answers. *I* know what people want. *I* know this isn’t true, but I let myself believe it anyway. I need to spread myself out and talk to a wider audience. I need to listen to what they say and throw out some of the perceptions I have. Clean slate time.

I had an opportunity to do that this past weekend. Microsoft held an informal gathering of MS Developer Evangelists from all over the world (already in L.A. for the PDC) and local college students to brainstorm on “digital lifestyle”. I piggybacked on this from the ITPro side as I have a passion around getting our technologies in the hands of students. I wanted to know – straight from students – what they thought of Microsoft and the products we have.

Let’s jump back to the clean slate thing real quick.

I grew up in the old days of real “chalkboards” that used super-dusty chalk. None of this fancy, low dust stuff. Dry erase boards were a still a pipedream. The chalkboards we had were a dark, heavy black and the chalk was a blinding, dusty white. Anything written on the boards was NOT easy to remove. It took some effort to really get the chalk off. Forget about it if the eraser was choked up with chalk dust. To really get it clean you had to use a damp cloth.

I thought I had a clean slate when I sat in on this meeting. Turns out I used an eraser instead of a damp cloth so I still had remnants lurking around my brain. Perceptions of students that just weren’t accurate.

As Ken Norton and Malcom Gladwell note, there are early adopters. In the computer world these are the uber-geeks that must have the beta before anyone else. They will gladly take an alpha as well. Thankfully, we did not have a room of uber-geeks. We had a room with some geeks, some developer students and then……miracle of miracles……history majors, pre-law, language majors and others. My first blown perception was that ONLY CompSci students would want to attend. Thankfully, we had an excellent mix.

My second blown perception was this: I thought the students would have heard about all of the products we have released and already made a choice on using the product or learning more about them. I was shocked and amazed when I spoke to three students together (2 – CompSci, 1 – Political Science) and none of them had heard of Media Center. I was even more shocked when they reacted to it as a very cool product they would use regularly (had they heard about it before now). Isn’t this part of our target market – students who need a PC and a digital media device when they leave home for school?

With that I whipped out the damp cloth and wiped away anything I thought I knew about the students and what they knew about our products. The only thing I was dead on about was the “hip and cool” factor. It does play a big part in product perception. From the students –

iPods are hip and cool (and very much associated with Apple) and….they just work (till they break). Windows is not cool. Office is cool, but only because you can’t survive as a student without it. Linux users are perceived as hip and cool (and knowledgeable) because they know more than just Windows and Office. Linux is cool because it is new and different (though none of the 6 students I talked to had ever used it). Microsoft is perceived as the “grandma company” and Windows as “grandma’s operating system”. Ouch. “If your friends think it is cool, you probably will too.” (peer-to-peer marketing). Apple makes “cool” products and students know what those products are. Microsoft makes Windows and Office. Beyond that the association of  Product Name to Microsoft trails off very quickly. (Wouldn’t it be great if we (MS) were more identifiable as one of the companies that made some of their cell phones work!?!?!). Oh yeah. Microsoft is Evil. But I never got a clear answer as to why. (Peer-to-peer perception spreading).

It was quite refreshing to hear all of this from a group other than the ITPros I speak to most every other day. The “I work in the field” ITPros know what MS products are and how they are used. Some think MS is evil but for different reasons than “my friend says so, so it must be” (though I would argue that this form of peer-to-peer perception spreading is a lot more prevalent than we realize). But I build my own perceptions about how the industry perceives Microsoft around the ITPros I am primarily connected to. The fact is, we have a 90%+ share of the home user/desktop market and they have a lot of spending dollars. We need to listen to them (and all the sub-groups) as well.

BTW…..There was a lot more valuable stuff in this brainstorming session besides the cool factor, but this post is already longer than I wanted.

What all of this boils down to is making sure when I decide to wipe slates clean that I use a damp cloth instead of a chalk laden eraser. There exist groups other than the ITPros I speak to that can give some excellent feedback on our products. I am going to keep my eyes and ears open.

Cheers!