Richard Flynn :: no comment

Yes, the title is supposed to be oxymoronic.

In the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine, there was a feature about corporate ‘transparency’, especially in tech companies.  In this instance, ‘transparency’ means opening your company up to the world, warts and all, so that the general public—all of whom are potential customers—can see what’s going on on the inside.

The idea which promotes corporate ‘transparency’ is that by talking about what you’re doing day-to-day, you increase general interest in your company, brand, and products.  Of course this ‘transparency’ is most commonly effected in the form of blogs and other new-media online content produced by named individuals within the company.

In order to achieve full transparency, the individual should be able to write or say what he likes without worrying about censorship by executives or press offices.  As soon as something is censored, it becomes just another example of corporate bumpf, and loses all pulling-power for the reader attracted by the possibility of some internal dirt.

One article by Fred Vogelstein within the extended feature in last month’s Wired was about Microsoft.  Microsoft is a huge, conservative company where the staff were tightly controlled about what they could and couldn’t say to people outside the company—outside their own divisions, indeed—under pain of dismissal.

Then, along came Channel 9, which is a site where video is posted from inside the Redmond campus of uncensored interviews with engineers, software architects, and managers.  The Wired article waxes lyrical about how Channel 9 provides exactly the sort of inside information about Microsoft that techies are keen on hearing.  The other method by which Microsoft bares its workings to the world is a collection of different blogs written by individuals and teams working on their many software products where the developers get to tell the Web surfers what they’ve been working on.

Channel 9 may be a breath of fresh air when it comes to corporate transparency for all I know—I must confess that I’ve never been attracted by the disparate variety of videos available there.  However, I do occasionally read the blog of the team which makes Microsoft software for the Mac, variously called the ‘Mac Business Unit’ and ‘The Office for Mac Team’.  The most recent post on that blog—published on 19th April, nearly a month ago—seems to contradict the suggestion that these blogs really give the users/product purchasers any more information about forthcoming products than they would have had previously.

The post, entitled ‘A love letter to Entourage’ did nothing but frustrate me and everyone else who commented on it.  For those who don’t know, Entourage is Microsoft’s Mac application equivalent to Outlook on Windows: it handles email, contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes.

Except the major problem is that while Entourage provides some support for working with a Microsoft Exchange Server,¹ there are some things that it can’t handle: syncing tasks and notes with the server, or server-side rules for sorting mail, or scheduling appointments with other people on the same server, to name but three.

These shortcomings of Entourage when it comes to Exchange server access are a fairly big deal, not only because they limit the extent to which individuals or departments can switch to using Macs within a company already heavily tied to the Exchange system.  A cynic might say that this is all a ploy by Microsoft to discourage big corporations from switching wholesale to the Mac, which would result in a loss of revenue from a reduction in the number of Windows licences being sold.  There might even be some truth in the suggestion that the Mac Business Unit can’t persuade the Exchange team at Microsoft² to help them with the development of Entourage’s Exchange support, which leaves them all on their own trying to work out how to get everything syncing properly with the Exchange server.

The slightly injudicious entry on Mac Mojo (the Microsoft Mac Business Unit’s blog)—I mean, how corny does it seem to write a ‘love letter’ to the four-year-old product you developed when everyone is just waiting for the new version?³—says nothing that wasn’t already known.  However, nearly all the comments on the entry (including my own) were about the poverty of the Exchange support in the existing version, and turned into desperate requests for information about the Exchange support expected in Entourage 2008.

Some of the Microsoft developers were responding to the comments.  However, absolutely no information was forthcoming about the Exchange matter.  Indeed, the point I raised about problems with the existing Entourage-Palm handheld sync conduit was addressed by Nadyne Mielke, one of the developers.  It’s not like they can’t see the clamour about Exchange.  They’re just remaining very tight-lipped.

Hardly transparent, eh?

I don’t mind these companies not in fact baring everything: they don’t want to pre-announce features that they can’t deliver on, thus disappointing the customers.⁴  What I do mind, however, is the pretence of transparency being upheld by the existence of the blog, and being promoted by the Wired article.

Let’s take another software developer as a point of comparison.  The Omni Group produces software titles for the Mac which aren’t necessarily aimed at the main stream.  The most popular is probably OmniOutliner, the basic version of which is included for free with every new Mac.⁵

The Omni Group also has a blog, called The Omni Mouth.  From about July 2006 they began to reveal that they were working on a new productivity application, to fit into the GTD⁶ system.  This would replace the free set of scripts, kGTD, which bolted on to OmniOutliner Pro to achieve something similar, albeit in quite a frustrating way.⁷ At the end of September 2006 they gave it a name, OmniFocus.

Over the subsequent months, a little more information began to trickle out about the new application.  Not a huge amount, mind: The Omni Group were very reluctant to be pinned down about, well, anything precise about the new application.  But, they were keeping the company’s devotees—or at least those who were also devotees of the GTD system—interested.

At this point, of course, The Omni Group hadn’t behaved any different to Microsoft when it comes to transparency.  Their message was ‘We’ve got a new GTD application.  You’ll probably like it.  We can’t say anything more at the moment, it’s kinda buggy.  Don’t push us for info, or for a shipping date.’  Microsoft’s message in the blog post I linked to above was, ‘Entourage is great at the moment, I can’t live without it.  The new version is going to be pretty slick too.  End of story.’

John Gruber, professional Mac-platform blogger,⁸ linked to the announcement of OmniFocus’ name with the title ‘Just a Little Reminder to Let Us Know That OmniFocus is Still Vaporware’.  He followed that up a couple of days later with the article ‘OmniVapor’, drawing attention to quite how little we knew about the application at the time, thus suggesting that this was all the merest hot air, or ‘Vaporware’ (sic).

That all changed last month, however.  First The Omni Group posted a screenshot of the application—still in its development stages—together with a fairly full list of features expected to be in the application, as well as information about what still needed to change before ship-date.  Nothing publicly available to test just yet, but the information was so popular that the server hosting the company’s blog crashed from all the attempts to look at the screenshot.

Ten days later, they published a video ‘screencast’ of the pre-release application with a commentary talking us through the features and workflow. ⁹  Perhaps more to the point, though, is the fact that hundreds of comments were being left on each blog post, and the software developers were responding effectively to the questions that were being asked about the new application.

My problem is not that the Mac Business Unit isn’t telling us anything about the new version of Entourage, even though it would be nice to know a little more than we do.  My complaint, rather, is that they pretend to be ‘transparent’ when in fact they are nothing of the sort.  The Omni Group, on the other hand, didn’t say much about their new product for many months.  What they did say, however, was, ‘We can’t say anything definite because we don’t know ourselves.  We’ll tell you about it when we’ve firmed up the development process.’  And, sure enough, with the recent entries on their blog they’ve come good on that promise; not only are they providing scripted information, but they’re answering people’s questions.  That’s rather more transparent.  Of course, the next thing is for them to release the beta of OmniFocus to those who have signed up for the beta programme (including me), but we know that’s coming.

In fact, I’ve given up on Entourage.  I don’t know if Exchange support is going to be improved in the new version (and if you didn’t know that I don’t know that, then you haven’t been reading this very closely!), but the Mac Business Unit’s determined lack of information on the matter seems to suggest that it won’t be.  For the moment I’m using the Mac OS X built-in Mail application, which does a pretty good job of dealing with Exchange servers for email once you’ve got it set up right.  Contacts, calendar, and tasks are all now handled using the OS X applications: they don’t sync with the Exchange server, but do sync with Apple’s .Mac service so I can access them from any computer.¹⁰

Update, 12th July 2007: The Mac Business Unit has apparently sat up and taken notice to people complaining about the lack of ‘transparency’ when it comes to their Exchange support in Mac Office 2008. See my follow-up post here.