Increasingly, other divisions at Microsoft are studying what the Xbox folks are doing right and trying to apply those lessons to their own divisions.
According to JJ Richards, General Manager of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Unit, Rule no. 1 is ” everything needs to be live now because customers are demanding it”, an this dictates how the products are designed, how the updates are rolled out etc.
You want to go to where your community is and build around it “Richards noted. ” And once you are connected, your ship cycle is totally different. You can roll-out new stuff every six months..
According to Richards some of the learning included:
- the need for simple tiers
- the Dashboard is the UI
- roaming accounts being key
There are more than 6 million Xbox Live users now - so I guess these examples have a message for everyone of us in the software business..
The article in this link from Mary Jo Foley has more on this subject: http://blogs.zdnet/microsoft/?p=421