Microsoft Presents Its Best Face
May 16, 2007WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is a hard-core technology event. The attendees are mostly engineers from hardware companies (and a few freelance geeks) building devices around Microsoft products like the Vista operating system, which Bill Gates says has sold 40 million copies. (I’m still waiting for my promised free Vista upgrade from HP 5 months after I bought my new PC; HP customer service is right down there with Dell.)
I missed most of Gates’ presentation, but I did catch one by one of Microsoft’s unsettlingly young and poised product managers. He was talking about Rally, which Mary Jo Foley calls “a set of networking protocols and licenses designed to simplify consumers’abilities to connect peripherals to Windows Vista and to each other.”
The presenter was a techie, presenting to a techie audience–yet he took the time to create and go through a slide explaining arcane Rally terms and acronyms like Windows Connect Now (WCN) and Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS).
In our media training program, we call this ‘when in doubt, spell it out.’ Too often, speakers cannot resist the urge to do an ‘information dump’ on their audience, who won’t understand the jargon, acronyms or internal Kool-Aid that company spokespeople have been drinking. And when an audience doesn’t understand, they won’t ask for clarification; who wants to lose face?
So kudos to Microsoft for understanding this and enhancing communications with their target audience. But don’t rest on your laurels: twenty thirty years of media training has almost brought forth a kindler, gentler Bill 2.0.
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