posted on Monday, August 20, 2007 4:33 PM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
Jeff Raikes interview - Print Preview
Interview with Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division and a member of the senior leadership team, from the Guardian covering piracy, Office 2007 UI, SharePoint, etc.
But the part that caught my eye was:
"As an example, what happened with Mac Excel in 1985 was that we had a
programmer called Steve Hazelrig who was doing the printing code. Laser printers
were expensive then, and ours was way down the hall, so Steve wrote a little
routine that put an image of the page up on the screen, with a magnifying glass
so he could examine every pixel to make sure he had an accurate rendering of the
page. The program manager Jake Blumenthal came down the hall and said: "Wow,
that would be a great feature." That's how Print Preview made it into all of our
products: no customer ever asked for it.
So the trick is to understand the things people want to do, and they may not
know to ask for them, but the opportunity is there. So I think it's more
important to understand what customers really want to do, and to make sure we
deliver on that."
Whether that is completely true or not, it's a good reminder to understand what people
really want do with software and it work for them.