Have I told you about when Steve Ballmer and I...
<Excuse>I’ve been meaning to re-start blogging for a while but the day-to-day time pressures of setting up everything from scratch has just got in the way. However, as today gives me a great opportunity to name drop, I thought now was as good a time as any to start to try and do better. </Excuse>
This week I’ve been at the Microsoft Partner Conference in Houston and have just had the pleasure of having lunch with Steve Ballmer and a great bunch guys from a variety of leading design houses (many from the UK including Flow Interactive, Think, Lightmaker, Metia, an Conchango as well as some US folks from Roundarch, Schematic, Cynergy, etc.). It is great to be at the table alongside these guys as the whole topic of user experience grows in appreciation inside Microsoft.
I’ll collate my thoughts before jotting them down, but one “take-away” from the meeting was that Microsoft is in a genuine listening mode at the moment and is trying to figure out how the whole design community can be effectively brought into the Microsoft fold. Designers are really an alien bread to the typical Microsoft developer models (Mort, Elvis and Einstein) and the discussions highlighted many ways in which those of us who strive to put the user experience at the centre of application design need to be addressed in a slightly different way.