For data enthusiasts everywhere, this is exciting news:
Great stuff. Surely there will be many lessons learned in transforming corporate culture like this. Microsoft is big enough and established enough to make this a real challenge, yet techy enough that it could be an absolutely natural transition.
Corporate data culture is one thing, but it also makes me think – can you imagine all the possibilities, if all Microsoft products were truly analytical? MS Word and PowerPoint doing sentiment analysis on your writing. Outlook telling you how much time you spent writing your e-mails, and which types of e-mails took you the longest to write. MS Project providing feedback on how your Gantt charts change from iteration to iteration.
And if you do analytics on the inter-workings of the different products – oh, boy! Skype suggesting that you really ought to stop using it because the Power Point slide you have been working on is still out of alignment and you really ought to be sending out the next revision of it in an hour.
I am loving this vision. Parts of it sound like pure magic – but it could be not all that far on the horizon.
I am a senior strategy consultant at IBM. The postings on this blog are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.