Dog fooding is heavily encouraged within Microsoft and heavily practiced (source: Microsoft employee). Whatever you think is wrong or went wrong, its not because none of us used it. The criticism in the article, if I understand it correctly, is that Microsoft is trying to please too many people.
I currently work with Microsoft and what you're doing isn't really "dog fooding" as I understand it. Dog fooding should mean that people are making a product that they themselves would want to use, to scratch an itch they actually feel.
What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
> Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android.
For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear.
(I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung)
Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience!
> What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself.
I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.
Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed.
From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves.
Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course.
The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second!
The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user does not get into the code base.
The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?"
All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that!
[0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a huge code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to work. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis.
Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.
That's funny, I switched from WP8 to Symbian a few weeks ago. An OS that doesn't have an accessible file system isn't very useful to me. Might as well use an S40 phone.
When Nokia killed Symbian, they had 60% of the phone market here in Brazil, and their sales were RISING (not declining, as they were in many other countries).
Now Brazil is the dream land for chinese knock-offs, and OS fragmentation, my startup make iOS and Android apps, and I found it bizarrely hard to sell those here, when I ask a random person on the street what phone they use, they don't know, and when I take a look I see:
If the person is very rich, or very dumb, a iPhone (very dumb because we had instances of people without money to eat taking crazy debts to buy iPhones... Apple Reality distortion field is crazy).
If the person is part of the shrinking real middle class (real because the government says that if you earn 500 USD month you are middle class, obviously this is absurd), a Samsung Android.
But those are 5% of the population at most... The rest of the population I see:
S40, Symbian (specially on... SONY phones O.o Sony had once a great Symbian line, and they were really popular here, and those phones are hell sturdy, lots of people still have them), Android customized to look like Symbian (Sony phones frequently do that too, I own a Xperia Play, and my mom a Symbian Sony Phone, and for any tasks the two are almost the same), HiPhone (a popular clone of iPhone that use some weird OS), Symbian clones (that usually have Facebook and Youtube but you cannot install anything else and is incompatible with actual Symbian), S40 phones, some blackberry and old windows phone (I never saw a WP8 phone! and I see more old windows phone than WP7 phone!)
This proved to be a nightmare to my startup, I cannot nab a random person in the street and convince them to install my app, because most likely they have some crazy phone OS that is not iOS, not Android, not WP8, not Blackberry.
And if someone launched a good sturdy phone with Symbian, hardware buttons (god how I hate touch-screen, specially when you need to dial in the rain in a very rainy country) but with a good API, I would GLADLY pay iPhone levels of money to have it. And I guess most brazillians would buy it too (although to them it must be old Symbian levels of price, iPhone level is reserved to the top 5% richest)
Many managers are used to a world where customers have no choice but to buy the latest offering. I don't think they've fully awakened to the thought that Microsoft can be left entirely out of a burgeoning market.
Everyone at MS knows, but nothing changes--especially not changes to WP to win over their own people. There is no changing the course of the ship once it has sailed. Everyone is too busy working on their tasks for that sprint to step back and look around. And the backlog is so large that there is no way that tiny annoyance of yours will get done before the "priority 1" bugs, even though it might have more meaningful impact to end users.
That's one of the biggest reasons I left. The majority of people I met seemed career driven, not product quality driven, and were happy to march to orders set a year ago -- however misguided now -- if it meant a checkbox filled on their review.
I used to work at msft too. You completely missed the point.
Dog fooding at ms is eating a substandard product to provide feedback. You grudgingly use it to help the company. See internal drives to get people to use bing.
How about making a product you don't need to cajole employees into? Think Google has ads to get people to use google search, or apple forces employees to use iPhones? (Or do they call it caviar-ing?)
If dog fooding is the reason employees use your product you should not release it.
Dogfooding is all about eating a possibly substandard product to provide feedback.
And then, you are expected to work on the feedback, so the product is not substandard anymore. I guess Microsoft is lagging on that part.
Anyway, I fully agree that if your employees are only using your product because you require it, you shouldn't release that, and that you shouldn't eat your own dogfood all the time.
Inside of google? (That's what I'm referring to with dog fooding, to convince your employees to use a substandard product "for the good of the company").
Google probably has "google search rocks" internal ads. They probably don't have "hey guys could you stop using bing for a bit and try our search engine?".
Sorry, I got sidetracked from the dogfooding main point. I'm pretty sure google don't need ads to cajole their employees into using their search. I was referring to their public ads.
This does seem true for the google ads. An overriding theme in them does try to make Google appear more friendly and likeable, rather than to grab more user share.
Although reinforcing a brand is still a big part of attracting and keeping customers. If Coca-Cola stopped advertising, they'd definitely lose sales.
I actually think dog fooding is a net negative because it teaches people to ignore bugs and bad UX. Everyone at MS is encouraged to run the latest half finished version of some software. You assume it will be "fixed later", but never actually follow up. Or worse, you make excuses for bugs and bad design instead of fixing them.
Ultimately, this means no accountability because you are not developing products you yourself would use by choice. You use IE because you're supposed to, not because you prefer it over Chrome or Firefox.
Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are.
