Futurecat - Michael Karek

Personal upfront investment vs. usage in Hotmail

We spend a lot of time studying how people manage their email. We know that people use a variety of tools to find messages, file messages, and navigate through all their mail. But some tools are used more commonly than others.

Of course, every tool has a certain learning curve that each person needs to go through to understand how it works. Some tools are simple, and might even feel as though you’ve used them a thousand times before (like sorting), and some tools are pretty complex to understand and configure (like rules, or custom keyboard shortcuts).

We’ve found that tools that require more time and effort to learn upfront tend to get used by fewer people. A tool that only a few people adopt might still be super handy for some folks – not to mention creative, clever, and cool. It’s just that there’s a converse correlation over time between the personal upfront time investment required to use any particular inbox management mechanism and the prevalence of its usage.

Source: Internal Microsoft data

We tend to geek out on technology here at the Mountain View, CA, facility where we build and manage Windows Live Hotmail. But as much as we like using ourselves as our own little focus group, we know that not everyone has the time or interest to invest in tinkering with complex features—no matter how handy or creative we think they are. Many people – maybe even most people – just want to get in and out of their email quickly and get done what they need to do.

That’s why minimizing the upfront personal investment for our customers is one of the central engineering principles guiding our current work on Hotmail. Our goal is to make any new tool as discoverable as possible, as intuitive as possible, and as efficient as possible. We don’t always nail it right out of the gate for every new feature, but we try – and we iterate based on the feedback we get from you until we’ve gotten the job done.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Hotmail

Yesterday, Forrester’s JP Gownder published a blog post highlighting some data from two new reports on Windows 7 adoption and satisfaction. The reports show that by the end of 2009, a strong majority of US consumers were aware of Windows 7. Windows 7 hit the market at the end of October so it’s pretty great to see that within just 2 months after launch a large portion of US consumers knew about Windows 7. Forrester also found that consumers who adopted Windows 7 in Q4 were generally very satisfied with their Windows 7 PCs.

And finally, another interesting finding was around upgrades. People move to a new OS one of two ways: either by buying a new PC or upgrading an existing PC. In the past, most people simply purchased a new PC to get a new version of Windows. With Windows 7, the data in the reports show that upgrading existing PCs was a much stronger trend with Windows 7. In the end, the reports show that early adopters who upgraded to Windows 7 were quite satisfied. Exciting to see the progress!

Some of you may have seen the Windows Phone 7 Series demo apps that were shown during the MIX10 keynote. If you missed them, here are videos of the demos that were shown during the keynote.

XNA demo

Microsoft originally created “Goo Splat” for Zune HD with XNA Game Studio and ported it to Windows Phone 7 Series. “Goo Splat” is a casual game that challenges the player to keep the goo from falling to the bottom and prevent the screen from filling up.

Seesmic

Loïc Le Meur from Seesmic shows the cross-platform capabilities of Silverlight. Seesmic is a BizSpark One startup.

Major League Soccer

Major League Soccer’s application for Windows Phone 7 Series lets fans track their favorite teams in real time, with notifications of game events, game stats and the ability to watch highlight clips via Silverlight and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a mobile application that lets you share your current location with your friends. Microsoft demonstrated an application that highlighted the location and mapping capabilities of Windows Phone 7 Series using the Foursquare APIs.

You can download the source code that was used to build this demo over on Codeplex: http://4square.codeplex.com

Graphic.ly

Using the Deep Zoom capability in Silverlight, Graphic.ly offers an immersive comic book reading experience on Windows Phone 7 Series that incorporates social interaction, with access to the subtleties of artwork and inking. Graphic.ly is a Microsoft BizSpark One startup partner.

Netflix

This Netflix app for Windows Phone 7 Series will include a list of new releases as well as a list of recommended stuff under the heading "Movies You’ll Love." After watching the video, it’ll also show up in the recently viewed menu of the Music and Videos hub on Windows Phone 7.

Associated Press

Associated Press (AP) worked with Microsoft on a rich news reading experience to serve as a launching point for AP Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series. A panoramic user experience incorporates news, social networks and photos as a way for people to select the newsmakers that interest them.

Shazam

Shazam is an amazing music discovery engine that allows you to find, buy and share the song that is playing right now.

To get the tools required to build apps like these, head over to http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/

Have you been developing for Windows Phone 7 Series? Share what you have been working on at http://wp7dev.reddit.com

We’re looking forward to seeing all the exciting apps that you have been building!

@ai

When we looked into how people used email, we found some interesting patterns. It turns out that there are generally three types of people when it comes to email: pilers, filers, and purgers.

Which are you?

• Piler: “I generally don’t put email into a folder or archive. I don’t delete it. I just let it pile up in my inbox."
• Filer: “I generally categorize messages by moving them into folders I’ve created or assigning labels to each message.”
• Purger:  “I generally delete email after I’ve read it.”

Different strokes for different folks. It’s a fun engineering challenge to build an email service that works well for all three types of folks.

Here’s a bit of data on how pilers, filers, and purgers tend to manage the email in their accounts.

Source: Microsoft internal

And a chart that will give you a sense as to what percentage of people are like you.

Coming up next – did you know that Hotmail has keyboard shortcuts? Did you know that you can choose between Outlook shortcuts and Gmail-compatible shortcuts? Pretty geeky, huh? I’ll talk next about how we think about those features that we geeks love and that most people never use.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail

Due to popular demand, the Windows Enterprise Trial program has been extended. This means you now have till Dec 31st, 2010 to download and evaluate the trial version.

The Enterprise trial is designed specifically for IT Professionals, so that you can test your software and hardware on a final version of the product. In addition, it provides the opportunity for you to become more familiar with the key improvements over previous versions of the Windows operating system, and experience firsthand how Windows 7 can make your PC environment more productive, secure, and manageable.

Since the trial software designed for IT Professionals interested in experiencing the Windows 7 Enterprise on behalf of their organization. We do not recommend that you install this if you are a not an IT Professional or not professionally managing corporate networks.

A few thing to be aware before you install the trial.

• You have 10 days to activate the product. If not activated within 10 days, the system will shut down once every hour until activated. Unsure on how to activate? Visit our FAQ.
• The 90-day Trial is the full working version of the Windows 7 Enterprise, the version most of you will be working with in your corporate environment. It will not require a product key (it is embedded with the download).
• The 90-day Trial will shut down once every hour when you have reached the end of the 90-day evaluation period.
• After the 90-day Trial expires, if you wish to continue to use Windows 7 Enterprise, please note that you will be required to purchase and perform a clean installation of Windows 7, including drivers and applications. Please keep this in mind; Windows 7 Enterprise is not available through retail channels.
• Technical details/updates/questions: Please review our FAQ or visit the Windows 7 support forum.

To learn more or get the download, please visit the Springboard Series on TechNet.

Part three in our four part series on Information Worker readiness from AJ Smith.

Ever need to share a file with someone? We all have. The old trick of sharing a file through email is still used by some, but more and more we are using removable USB memory sticks to share files. After a while we all end up with two, three, and sometimes more of these USB memory sticks and random files stored across them. As time goes by, we forget what we have put on the memory sticks and eventually we lose them!

That’s when a moment of panic might set in. Where did the stick go? What was on it? Did it contain any of my personal information? Company confidential information? Personally identifiable information of my company’s customers? BitLocker is a technology in Windows 7 that helps avoid these moments of panic by allowing us to encrypt not only the hard drive of my computer, but also removable storage devices. The ability to encrypt our storage devices, protecting the data if it is lost or stolen, can help us and our companies with our data compliance requirements, and even perhaps help save our corporate reputations and avoid costly fines the next time we misplace a laptop or a memory stick.

Thankfully, protecting our USB memory sticks with Windows 7 is easy with BitLocker To Go. In order to use BitLocker To Go, all I need to do is simply right-click on a removable storage device within Windows Explorer and then left-click on “Turn on BitLocker…” as shown below.

From there on out the process is pretty simple and intuitive. BitLocker will ask you how you want to unlock the protected memory stick and most folks will want to select a password as shown below. This password is used to encrypt the device and if you lose it you may not be able to access the contents of the device anymore. So you need to choose a strong password so that others cannot guess it but make sure it is one you will not forget! After you choose the password, Windows will encrypt the memory stick for you. Depending upon the size of the device, this could take a minute to quite a while. So make sure you protect your memory sticks when you get them so that they are always ready to use in a protected fashion.

The next time you go to use a BitLocker To Go protected USB memory stick, you will be prompted for your password. You remember it, right? Good. The dialog is shown below and is pretty self-explanatory. However, the “Automatically unlock on this computer for now on” could use a little explanation. It does exactly what it says, after you have supplied the password once and selected this option you will never need the password again on this specific computer. BitLocker To Go takes care of the details for you, but use this option with care. On the computers that you use on a regular basis, this is probably a great option to select, for next time you insert your USB memory stick, it automatically gets unlocked and is ready for us. However, you should never use this option on a computer you do not own or use regularly.

Using BitLocker To Go on all of your USB memory sticks should give you the peace of mind that the data is protected and safe, even if you happen to lose the device. As long as you remember that password you used to encrypt the device, you will be able to safely access the data from any Windows 7 PC. What about your friends, family and co-workers who are not lucky enough to have Windows 7 yet? Do not despair, you can still share files with them using the BitLocker To Go Reader as long as they are running Windows XP or Windows Vista. The BitLocker To Go Reader gives down-level Windows computers the ability to copy files off of a BitLocker To Go protected USB memory sticks (provided you know the password of course) onto Windows XP and Windows Vista systems.

There you have it, a quick rundown of BitLocker To Go: the simple, intuitive way for Windows 7 users to protect data on all of their USB removable storage devices.

To get more IW tips and tricks, check out our IT Pro at Home section here.

On the Windows Live Hotmail team, we spend a lot of time talking to people about email. It’s one of the ways we figure out what people want, what their pain points are, and what we can build that might delight them. Even though we’re the most widely used email service in the world with over 369 million people actively using Hotmail, and have been providing the Hotmail service to consumers since 1997, and even though we work closely with the Microsoft Exchange folks who have been providing email for corporations since 1996 – there’s always more to learn. And things change, so it’s important to keep in touch with the people who use our service so that we’re not operating on past assumptions.

Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.

• You’re still very attached to your personal email accounts. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.     
• Email is today’s tool of choice for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center
• Email is your online photo album, too. People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos.
• Email might be the only cloud storage solution you use. People currently keep 15,576,853,555 Microsoft Office documents stored on our servers – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. 95% of our storage capacity is taken up not by messages, but by attachments.

Here’s some other data you might find interesting.

Top 10 reasons people use email today

Lots of reasons – people are busy in their inboxes!

Frequency of email usage

It’s frequent.

How people communicate – by email, social networking, or both

The results are pretty balanced although you can see that if it’s a more serious conversation it tends to land in email.

How much do your social network and your email contacts overlap?

On average, the overlap is well under 50% – the majority of people who you’ve befriended or connected with on your social network of choice are not the same contacts that you have in your email address book – and vice versa. Social networking and email are pretty distinct.

These are just a few things that we’ve learned about the ways in which you’re using your email accounts today. We’re learning all the time and applying what we’ve learned to make the product better and better. We’ll share a few more tidbits over the next few days, so stay tuned, and keep using Hotmail!

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail

One month ago, the Windows Home Server team filmed a 10-minute feature story for the national TV show Designing Spaces entitled “Innovations for the Connected Family, Solutions for Managing and Protecting Your Media.” Designing Spaces, currently in its sixth season, recently ran its 100th episode. The show’s innovative topics and expert advice continue to attract a sophisticated audience of homeowners and do-it-yourself enthusiasts. This was filmed to educate families and home office users about Windows Home Server.

The segment will feature Senior Product Manager, Mark Pendergrast, who provided an excellent overview and short demos of the product. Then, to illustrate Mark’s points, we filmed one of our Seattle-based customers, Jim and Cindy Combs (who were a part of the original beta program) talking about their use of — and love for — the product. The Combs’ are huge fans and generously gave up a workday to film for us. Their story is powerful because it not only shows how average families can use Windows Home Server, but how small/home-based businesses can benefit as well. Cindy talked about how she uses Windows Home Server to run her PR/marketing company out of her home office.

I was lucky enough to attend the film shoot and do some of my own flip-cam, behind the scenes filming of the day. The first clip shows some of the set creation, and includes an interview with the director, George Tweddle, Senior Producer for o2 Production Studios, Inc.

In the second clip below, you will be able to see Mark Pendergrast during his interview, and also hear his final thoughts on how the day went.

The show will begin airing on April 9, 2010 nationwide. Distribution includes 20 airings on: The Learning Channel (TLC), Womens Entertainment (WE), and Network affiliates for: ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX. Please see below for the schedule. In addition the segment will stream 24 hours a day on the www.designingspaces.tv website.

-Nicole

Windows Live Messenger is both a powerful and fun communications tool for staying in touch with your friends, family and co-workers.  It is a semi-enclosed environment where you can freely interact with the people you know and trust – the people in your network. Unfortunately, over the last couple of months, we’ve been monitoring an increase in spammers and malware distributors trying to work their way into our customers’ networks of trusted Messenger contacts.

How Messenger spam works

First the spammer identifies potential targets.  They do this by searching for public Spaces, by acquiring lists of valid Hotmail accounts, and by trading with other spammers.  Second, the spammers set up a number of Windows Live ID accounts and use these accounts to send invitations to their potential targets.

A typical invitation looks like this:

If you accept a spammer’s invitation, they can then download your list of friends to find new people to target, and send messages to you and your friends trying to attract you to spam, phishing, or malware websites. See my previous blog post on URL reputation to learn about the protections that SmartScreen® provides if you do end up clicking one of these links.

We’re working on delivering several technologies to help us reduce these bogus invitations. In fact, starting this week we are deploying a number of immediate new steps to block and root out these spammers, and to limit the number of invitations they can send. 

Don’t let spammers in the door

You can take steps to protect yourself too. One thing you can do is click the View profile link in the invitation, to try to figure out if it is from a spammer or an old friend.  Viewing the profile won’t hurt you or your computer, and it won’t add the spammer to your network, so it is always a good first step.  This is like what you might do at home, if someone came knocking at your door unexpectedly. You’d probably look through the peep hole before deciding whether or not to let them in.

If you still don’t recognize this person, and think they really might be a spammer, then don’t answer the door — and let us know by clicking the check boxes to block them and report them as spammers.

Better safe than sorry

And don’t worry about reporting abuse. Even if you accidentally report a long lost friend as a spammer, we won’t shut down anyone’s account based on one piece of feedback. In this world, it’s better to be safe than sorry. You might also find these 10 tips for safe instant messaging useful.

As with all service abuse scenarios, this is another arms race.  We know abusers are motivated, and will attempt to react every time we add new protections, but we’re motivated too. We’re continually working to protect everyone on the network from these types of attacks.

John Scarrow
General Manager – Safety Services

PS. If you think you may have already fallen victim to a phishing scam, check out these tools for removing malware and preventing further issues.

• Download Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus, antispyware)
• Help remove malware with the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool

We’ve just release a package of application bar icons for developers building apps/games for Windows Phone 7 Series. This package contains a set of 64 app bar icons that you can use when developing applications for Windows Phone. In addition to the 64 icons in PNG format (32 dark and 32 light), this package also contains vector versions that can be easily imported into Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Beta when using the Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone. For more information on how to use these icons within your application, see How to: Add an Application Bar to Your Application on MSDN.

Grab the icon pack now! http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187311