The past few months have been busy for me and for my team. I took a long vacation back to Istanbul, giving me an opportunity to disconnect from my work and my blog for a while, and then came back to a new organization, a launch, and a very active Seattle.
As Moz recently summarized in an entry, we went through some reorganizations and the changes they brought. We seem to have settled into a new structure for now: product management and marketing roles have been more clearly delineated, while lines around our products have blurred. As most of you know, I have been working on the Spaces and Writer products for the past two years. In an effort to bring more seamless experiences to our customers in our next waves of planning, I will now be heading a new team focused on Sharing and Social Networking. Product management for a lot of the services you are familiar with, such as Spaces, Events, Writer, Photo Gallery, will now be run from my team, giving us a better view of your end-to-end sharing scenarios. Chris and Charlotte will be the managers on my team, as well as JP, a new product manager joining us to bring you better Memories experiences. My marketing leads like Marty, Marianna, and Pooja will continue to work on marketing, moving to the organizations running US and international execution.
In addition to the organizational changes, we have been busy building software. You probably saw the launch of Windows Live Events and a set of new features last week, especially the improved "What's New" section. Windows Live Photo Gallery also raised the bar with Flickr integration. I am excited with the stuff coming out but am painfully aware of how much we still have to do, in order to bring great experiences together.
I have been receiving a lot of questions lately about "Spaces' social networking" plans. Speculation around our partnerships have also led to the questions "isn't Spaces Microsoft's competitor to Facebook? What social scenarios are you thinking about?" While I cannot divulge any long term plans here, let me clarify one thing: "social networking" for us refers to the set of online experiences that allow users to feel connected with the people they care about. You did not see "Spaces" anywhere in there, did you? That is because I do not equate it with Microsoft's "social network." A lot of players have done a good job building profile networks --MySpace and Facebook most notably. I am a Facebook user (and Twitter, and MySpace, and a bunch of other things) and have a lot of respect for what they are doing. However, I do think that social scenarios will extend well beyond a "profile network," and defining social networking as a "website where I have a profile, friends, FoF, and some communities I share with" may be short sighted. Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail should become amazing social experiences. Our memories experience should tie in. Events and others
should become great social experiences, not to forget MSN. And all these things will be part of our "social networking" plans. Do not equate "what is Spaces doing" to "what is Microsoft doing" so quickly --and I do not think Facebook is thinking so narrowly either. We will continue to develop and improve Spaces of course, but we are trying to think broader to address your needs.
I will save writing about Istanbul to another day. I am excited to be back in Seattle, but I already miss home. Perhaps a good skiing season will lessen that feeling!
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