Design Thinking Digest

Innovation: Laying the groundwork in the enterprise

This post is adapted from a paper that appears in the Journal of Business Strategy entitled Cultural Innovation in Software Design: The New Impact of Innovation Planning Methods.

In the world or celebrity fame often seems to come overnight—sometimes it does. With entrepreneurs and startups success often seems to happen overnight as well. In truth, many great ideas and, and stars, are made and shaped over time. This is double true in the enterprise, where size and inertia can sabotage the best of intentions. Many of the successes we see in the market place today—or that are imminent, really got there start long ago.

the fall of 2007 Steven Ballmer addressed Microsoft employees during its internal annual meeting and outlined the strategic imperatives that the company would focus on for 2007 and 2008. In addition to talking about Microsoft’s core pillars of business and technology, he focused on a new one, User Experience. Mr. Ballmer spent a considerable amount of time talking about how user experience would become the third pillar on which Microsoft would stage its success in software. This was welcome news to the 574 designers that worked at Microsoft in the fall of 2007, comprising just a fraction of the 79,000 total employees that worked at Microsoft at the time. However, the news came at a particularly troubling time. Microsoft was recently experiencing a exodus of senior design talent. This presented a troubling dilemma if Microsoft was to focus fully on this new imperative and an internal study indicated why. Despite an executive commitment to design, such as the recent hiring of design researcher Bill Buxton and the success of designers such as Steve Kaneko with the Xbox and Zune, many designers simply didn’t feel that the company had a cultural grasp of the value of design.

“21 out of 23 designers interviewed expressed that executive staff ‘does not understand design’ and they do not believe design is ‘part of the Microsoft culture’.”[1]

The UX leadership teams were faced with both a dilemma and a wonderful set of circumstances in which to solve it. One of the first things UX leaders did in Microsoft was take a hard look at some of the challenges of being a designer in Microsoft and developed a special leadership program for UX designers that was launched in January of 2008. The program focused on four key areas which were: strategic thinking, user experience vision, communication, and organizational agility.

We’ll cover the first one in today’s post and then dive into the remainder three in future posts.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking programs were focused on helping traditional designers and user experience practitioners in developing skills to align decision-making cycles with business strategies to drive innovation. In turn, these skills and their benefits were also readily explained to product managers across Microsoft—the role that ultimately guides and provides leadership for the vision of a product or service within Microsoft.

Two major influences in this area had impact. One was the work of Roger Martin and his thesis around how organizations need to seek validity versus reliability.[2] Martin’s work resonated specifically around Microsoft’s need to balance incremental innovation through refinement of existing knowledge with the need to enable breakthrough innovations.

Microsoft, as typical of many enterprises, focused on developing evidence for future products needs based on past outcomes. It used a limited number of objective variables to removed judgment and bias from decisions to support innovation. Martin characterized this type of substantiation as reliability (looking into the past to make an informed judgment about the future). Designers focused on substantiation based on future events. They used a broad number of diverse variables. Using processes that integrated judgment and acknowledged the reality of bias or looking for a production of outcomes that meets objectives for product. Martin characterized the skill sets and their propensity via the predilection gap[3] and although working from different directions and using different vocabularies many in Microsoft recognized that the concept of reliability versus validity needed to be better integrated into our product development lifecycles.

Image Copyright © 2008 by Roger L. Martin

This type of thinking was starting to be applied to Microsoft’s product planning thinking. For example, the following chart refers to existing product development models that possess a strong focus on reliability.

Figure 1. Traditional program management

Recent trends and thinking around the reliability versus viability dynamic have altered this model to be more representative of the following.

Figure 2. Current trends: Value proposition and combined engineering teams

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[1] (Petschnigg, 2007)

[2] (Martin, The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2005, 2005)

[3] (Martin, Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage, 2008)

Now what’s interesting is to pay attention to how some of these changes that were put in place a few years ago are impacting Microsoft today. One of the first places this thinking was applied was with Office 2007, one of the second was the development of Windows 7. Increasingly we’ll continue to see the benefits of this thinking with products and services that will be announced in 2009.

Productivity: Business value in software development

My last post looked to the past to explain how productivity was a key to Microsoft’s initial success but that new business models and the ascent of the internet has changed that equation.

One simple way to illustrate this is to look at software development. Historically software development has had it’s roots in what is good for the IT organization. Is it cheaper, easier, manageable for technologists to do what they need to accomplish? This was pretty evident in the systems design and command and control structure of technology as it evolved in the 50s through the 80s.

The advent of the PC opened up a new opportunity. It made technology more accessible to folks outside the traditional groups that controlled technology. In effect, non-technology oriented folks in consumer and enterprise markets had a new say in how things could be done and if they didn’t like what the IT organization was saying or doing they could often take things into their own hands. This basically let to the birth of modern operating systems and productivity software as we know it.

But this phase held on to some of the patterns from the command and control days, de-facto standards were held by a few an interoperability was something people thought about begrudgingly or not at all. In fact the business models of all the competitors of the day were based on this thinking, in short the models worked—for a time.

But the internet caused a disruption to this way of thinking. In the enterprise folks had grown frustrated with established hegemony and the Web opened up a new way of thinking. One, it made it easier to write applications that anyone could use. Two, it simplified distribution. But compromises were made around ease of use and productivity often took a back seat to the utility that the internet provided.

In addition, as the utility of the internet spread to consumer focused applications created by a whole new general of developers abandoned the traditional practices of application development—in fact many were never exposed to classic development projects in the first place.

There were benefits to this for all of us. As consumers we could things online or get access to data that previously might have been very difficult, it might be difficult to use these new tools but difficult was better than impossible

This new models made life easier for developers too, they were a step down the path of ‘write-once, run everywhere.’

In the late 90’s however cracks began to appear in this revolution. The concept of being easier for developers did not necessarily mean cheaper. It wasn’t uncommon for early commerce sites for large scale efforts to cost anywhere from 15 million to 100 million US dollars—amounts that almost defy description today. Much of this was because IT in the late 90s was similar to automotive industry in the early parts of the 20th century where there were hundreds of car manufactures competing for consumer’s business, there was no standardization and no interoperability, this made things really hard.

Worse still is what happened when these cobbled together systems actually started generating revenue. It became increasingly difficult to modify or make changes to applications that were mission critical but that were so complex that every feature rollout was the IT equivalent to performing brain surgery where a single mistake could cost millions in lost revenue.

Two things happened that pulled this revolution back from the brink and both of them really boil down to productivity.

One is that developers and software makers started focusing on standards—regardless if the solutions they created were ‘free’ or ‘open’. Web developers demanded it and used technology that was exclusively standards-based and enterprises that required more than standards could provide at least wanted the flexibility to interoperate with these standards and other technology. It’s hard to find any standards-based or proprietary technology today that doesn’t think about interoperability.

The second is that the level of frustration with the usability of technology came to the forefront. It wasn’t just about did an application actually work but could a person actually figure out how to use it.

Both of these drivers have been a key part of the Web 2.0 phenomena with the popularity of AJAX and rich media experiences enabled with things like Flash, Silverlight, etc. It even extends to the power of client software, such as iTunes, WPF applications, AIR applications and other solutions that take advantage of client hardware versus a browser.

I think the next wave of productivity is starting now and it’s focused on productivity in application development and life cycle management and in total cost of investment and return on investment.

When we think about productivity in application development and life cycle management we are really talking about the concept of the ‘Inverted-T’. Which can be defined at the repeatable best practices that we can apply to every project versus re-inventing the wheel. For example why build a content management system when you can buy one or save money implementing an open source option? Why spend money designing a architectural work pattern for a manufacturing facility if you can license one? Why build an authentication system if you can leverage one as a service? This type of thinking represents the horizontal part of the ‘T’. This way of thinking allows us to go deep and focus the majority of our attentions on the parts of our business that allow for differentiation and innovation.

We can also think about life-cycle management. For example does our workflow allow asynchronous round tripping through of projects and assets from designers to developers. Very few workflows do this today, one does (I’ll be polite and not mention them by name). I suspect this type of workflow will become standard in many environments and that in some agile Web processes traditional design tools will be eclipsed by tools that work in the target delivery medium (Vectors versus bitmaps for example or HTML and CSS that don’t need to be factored from static visual designs).

The final dimension in the next wave of productivity is probably services. We already have a myriad of services available to us around commerce, community, identity, location, search but the next wave of services, commonly called ‘cloud’ services are going to go far beyond that. In the future Knowledge Management or email systems might make more sense for many companies if they exist outside of an enterprise’s data center and in a cloud—much like we host many of our Web sites today if we’re a small to mid-size business. These type of moves will start letting developers in the enterprise and smaller entities focus on the core strategies that allow their business to innovate.

We’re starting to see signs of this already in the market. For example look at the ability of a service-based site like Mint.com. Their ability to innovate and role out new features is far more capable that some of their more traditional peers.

Lesser known examples might be click-ones applications that can silently and quickly introduce new features without proactive user activity.

The next post in this topic will dive into services and show how once we’ve taken advantage of the productivity gains that can come in software development and services that we’re ready to set the table for real breakthrough innovation.

Productivity: Business value through efficiency

This post is adapted from a paper that appears in the Journal of Business Strategy entitled Cultural Innovation in Software Design: The New Impact of Innovation Planning Methods

Microsoft is a company that historically was guided by a simple premise, “A PC on every desk and in every home.” Microsoft’s role in that premise was simple, to be the creator of the software that would run on those computing platforms, creating every piece of software a consumer would need. As the Economist noted in a July 26^th, 2008 Microsoft’s success in this endeavor hinged on two important insights.

The first was that computing could be a high-volume, low-margin business. Until Microsoft came along, the big money was in maintaining a select family of very grand mainframes. Mr. Gates realised that falling hardware costs, combined with the negligible expense of making extra copies of standard software, would turn the computer business on its head…Profit would come from selling a lot of them cheaply, not servicing a few at a great price.”

“Mr. Gates also realised that making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. Even as firms like Apple clung on to both the computer operating system and the hardware—just as mainframe companies had—Microsoft and Intel, which designed the PC’s microprocessors, blew computing’s business model apart.

Although it’s difficult to recognize how inspired and innovative this thinking was over 33 years ago it was augmented by another important and unique characteristic of Microsoft in its early days as the Economist continues to elaborate.

The technology industry likes to sneer at Microsoft as a follower. And it is true that the company has time and again bought in or imitated the technology of others…His (Bill Gate’s) genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

In effect, Microsoft in its early days was a company that was focused on incremental technology innovation and product optimization. The combination of this one-two punch of innovation in business model and technology enhancement has enabled Microsoft to become one of the most successful and profitable companies in the world.

But as Microsoft prepares to enter the twilight of its fourth decade in existence it faces new challenges that require a fundamental reshaping of its core value offerings and how it will develop and innovate in the realms of software in the future. These challenges include emerging business models focused on advertising supported software, search, open source software, and services. The emergence of new computing form factors in the mobile space and among consumer devices focused on media and entertainment space also are having a dramatic impact on how businesses and consumers perceive and embrace computing in both established and emerging markets.

So…how does Microsoft consider to grow and thrive in this new market where open source and new business models are the disruptive innovation? My next post will look at some of the changes in Microsoft over the past few years that serve as ‘ingredients’ for innovation, and set the table in Microsoft for how to address these challenges.

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Quotes from The Economist. (2008, June 26). The Meaning of Bill Gates. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from Economist.

Resetting Design Thinking Digest

It’s been some time since I’ve used Design Thinking Digest as much of a forum, for commentary or curation. Some of this is because I’ve found tools such as Linked In, Facebook and Twitter have replaced much of what I used Design Thinking Digest for—but some of it is probably also due to what I’d characterize as ‘social media fatigue’. After SxSW and MIX I wasn’t certain I was contributing much that was unique or that warranted a blog post.

Over the past three months a big part of my daily activities I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about how the economic slowdown is impacting the digital marketing and digital agency ecosystem that I frequently work with.

Like any other segment of our economy it’s been hit hard by current events. But, perhaps not surprisingly to many readers, parts of these eco-system are also thriving as they never have before.

As I put a toe back in the blogosphere I see three trends that will impact designers greatly over the next 12 to 24 months.

Welcome to the new normal

Our new economic environment is not a downturn as much a  reset. The realities that we deal with today are marketing dynamics that we’re gong to have to deal with going forward. In fact this is a theme that Steve Ballmer has been touching on for some time in many public speeches. In Chicago recently he framed it this way at a luncheon at the Chicago Executive Club.

I want to talk a little bit about the economy, but really only to set up the thing that to me is probably more important to talk about, which is productivity and innovation. We are going through an unprecedented kind of economic (crisis) – I like to call it reset. I don't think we're in a recession; I think we are resetting. I think this is the new normal, and yesterday was the exception. And I think we got ourselves there in a lot of ways, but economic growth in general is fueled, GDP growth is fueled by productivity and innovation and debt, and over the last 10, 15, 20 years we've seen debt for businesses and consumers rise to almost 300 percent of GDP. It was 150 percent, by the way, before the Great Depression. And we were kind of borrowing our way to prosperity, and I'm afraid post-reset we're going to have to innovate and improve productivity to drive GDP growth.

It's clear debt will not be the economic growth driver of the next 10 years. After every major deleveraging of the world's economy in the last 200 years, people were slow to bring back debt.

Social media is the driver of innovation in marketing and mass media

Although I may have ‘fatigue’ from social media it’s perhaps more important now than it ever was. Social media is the glue of just about every advertising, marketing, communications or public relations scenario that you can think of. But most CTOs or CMOs misunderstand or are flat out terrified of the implications. There has never been a better opportunity for professionals and services that can enable the architecture of social media scenarios. But it’s still a nascent space requiring a hybrid of skills that is not the exclusive domain of social media pioneers that build great individual brands nor digital marketers focused more on digital, but traditional, push or destination marketing in the digital realm.

Productivity and innovation will drive economic growth

We we talk about an economic reset one pillar that companies use to fuel growth, debt, is effectively off the table for many folks. For fueling growth we need to turn to the other two pillars of innovation and productivity.

If you compare the capital costs of starting a business in 1999 to 2009 it’s a different world. The infrastructure to get phone service, office space, internet and office productivity tools is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago. A committed entrepreneur can have a digital shingle on a door in a matter of a few hours today because of the advent of services that we just not available and competitive in the world of Web 1.0.

But if you look at the way we build and implement business-both physically and digitally you might find that little has changed in many economic segments.

If you look at how companies measure or ‘sense’ what their actual business performance is many companies are lousy at it.

The successful companies of tomorrow will use technology and new business processes and workflows to increase productivity in areas they’ve yet been able to, or had incentive to address.

Productivity alone is now enough however, it’s a tide that raises all boats if we continue with metaphors. What does provide a competitive advantage is innovation. Innovation isn’t borne completely of technology, but is also a result of the application business strategy and the innovation planning process that a company can bring to bear. This where concepts like a thorough understanding of customer experience and platforms can allow a company to shine. It’s why the iPhone and the Application Store are such a success, it’s why Windows, with a global platform of one billion users and vast developer ecosystem is still incredibly powerful and valuable despite recent predictions about it’s demise.

Over the summer I’ll be focusing a bit on the things we can control as designers in our own profession practice and with our customers—namely how can we be more productive and how can we, as designers, be a key driver of innovation.

A curated list of things to do at SxSW, Sunday, March 15th

Sunday is when the EXPO floor of SxSW finds its rhythm. You’ll find a variety of folks exhibiting there (from startups to the US Army and all the outliers in between). Some of the best conversations I have at SxSW occur on the Expo floor. Microsoft will there too, if you wonder what we could be possibly doing that would matter to you, check us out. Or…if you’ve got feedback for Microsoft, stop by and give it to a real person.

Here’s what I’ll be checking out on Sunday.

Sunday, March 15th

Tips and Tricks for Making the Most of Creative Suite 4
Room Hilton A
Sunday, March 15th
10:00 am - 11:00 am

Add this to your SXSW Calendar

Join Greg Rewis, author and industry-renowned Adobe evangelist, to learn how to get the most out of Creative Suite 4. Greg will show you hidden features in Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and more. During his performance, and it will be a performance I'm sure, he'll also show you his favorite time-saving tips and tricks, and who knows what else you'll walk away with hint. hint. You certainly won't want to miss this fun and informative session.

I’m not certain I’ll learn anything new here but I always like to give Greg the opportunity to give a few potshots in my direction when we’re at the same events. It’s just this thing we do. :)

Greg Rewis Creative Solutions Evangelism,   Adobe
Ryan Stewart Evangelist,   Adobe

Violating the Warranty on Your Touch Computing Device
Room 10
Sunday, March 15th
11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

Simple touch computing is taking the world by storm in desktop, mobile, and environmental computing. The best and brightest are taking their gloves off, drawing inspiration from Star Wars to James Bond, and going beyond the conventional bounds of touch computing. See what design and technology leaders are doing next with technology like Microsoft Surface and other touch computer platforms.

This is a panel that I’m moderating. Touch is a hot topic and here we’ll focus on why Surface is far more than a ‘big ass’ table and we’ll talk to folks that are actually building and deploying touch apps TODAY versus just talking about what will happen in the future.

Chris Bernard User Experience Evangelist,   Silverlight/Microsoft
Joe Engalan Dir of Dev,   Vectorform
Erik Klimczak Creative Dir,   Clarity Consulting
Joe Olsen CEO,   Phenomblue
Dan Thompson, Developer, Manifest Digital

CSS3: What's Now, What's New and What's Not?
Room 8
Sunday, March 15th
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

This panel explores how major browsers implement CSS3. The focus is on finding effective and efficient methods for developers to unleash their creativity while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. The panel covers current implementations, future plans from the major browser vendors and some discussion of the current progress on the standard itself.

A great, annual panel at SxSW with a great lineup. If you care about the standards based Web this is one you don’t what to miss.

Molly Holzschlag Pres,   Molly.com Inc
David Baron dbaron.org
Chris Wilson Web Platform Architect,   Microsoft
Hakon Wium Lie Opera Software
Sylvain Galineau Program Mgr,   Microsoft

Three great events this night.

Adobe 12th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony - Presented by Adobe 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Downtown Hilton Hotel, 6th Floor (500 E 4th St)

The Web Awards Ceremony is the centerpiece of evening activities at the SXSW Interactive Festival. This year's emcee is "conscious comic and vigilante pundit" Baratunde Thurston. The SXSW Web Awards are presented by Adobe, Web Awards Supporting Sponsors are Convio and All Web Leads.

FG SQUARED Party
9:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Lucky Lounge (209 W 5th St)

Hightail it over to the FG SQUARED shindig. It's gonna be aces--grab a highball on the house and knock back some buckshot with Austin's interactive marketing big leaguers. We'll have a cool cat spinning all of Frank's favorites, plus we're playing BINGO (you heard me, Daddy-O.) Swing, baby!

Facebook friends.get Party 2009
9:30 pm - 1:30 am
Pangaea (409 Colorado St)

Do you develop, design or dance like a superstar? Facebook is hosting a party with live entertainment for our developers and partners. Stay up-to-date on all the SXSW activities at http://www.facebook.com/sxsw.

What is LEED: FlashPoint Academy and the City of Chicago

Our PhizzPop Design Challenge Finale in Austin is rooted in a real world scenario. Namely, how Howard Tullman made FlashPoint Academy the first LEED certified educational institution in Chicago.

Video courtesy of FlashPoint. Yes, you’ll need Silverlight to see it.

See more about FlashPoint Academy at their site or on YouTube.

A curated list of things to at SxSW, Saturday, March 14th

Start your morning off but checking out Barcamp again.

Some panels I like and will be trying to check out are listed below.

Saturday, March 14

The 7 Rules for Great Web Application Design
Room Hilton A
Saturday, March 14th
10:00 am - 11:00 am
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

In this lively and interactive session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., the author of 'Designing the Obvious' and 'Designing the Moment', uses the audience to reveal the 7 essential design principles for achieving great application design and the psychology behind them. And he does it all without a single bullet point (gasp!).

Robert Hoekman Jr User Experience Designer,   Miskeeto LLC

Microformats: A Quiet Revolution
Room 10
Saturday, March 14th
11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

Microformats are quietly changing the landscape of the web, achieving some of the original ideals of the 'semantic web.' In the past year, we've seen increased adoption from web designers and popular web sites, improved browser support for microformats in both Firefox and IE, and search engines beginning to support microformats. Come hear from the leaders who are driving these changes in the industry, and find out what the future holds for microformats.

Tantek Çelik tantek.com
Leah Culver Software Engineer,   Six Apart Ltd
Karsten Januszewski Developer,   Microsoft
Glenn Jones Creative Dir,   Madgex
Jeremy Keith Technical Dir,   Clearleft Ltd

Connecting Interrelated Design and Development Workflows
Room 10
Saturday, March 14th
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

Design and development are like siblings in the creative process constantly trying to express their individuality but a lot closer than they're willing to admit. This session will explore the interrelated disciplines of design and development by looking at three specific project types: designer/developer collaboration for the Flash Platform; designer/developer collaboration for Ajax; and cross-media design and publication. You'll see how designers and developers can achieve peace through more efficient integration and collaboration across media types and disciplines.

Doug Winnie Group Prod Mgr Workflow,   Adobe
Ryan Stewart Evangelist,   Adobe

Should I Build My Startup on Ruby on Rails?
Room Hilton D
Saturday, March 14th
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

You've heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You've also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Joshua Baer Founder,   OtherInbox

Of course the night wouldn’t be complete without a few official parties. Two great ways to kick off the party circuit at SxSW are on Saturday night.

SXSW Interactive Opening Happy Hour hosted by Razorfish
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Madison (307 W 5th St)

Start mixing it up on day one with Razorfish at The Madison. For more information, visit our Razorfish SXSW Facebook page:

SXSW Interactive Opening Party Hosted by frog design
8:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Mexican American Cultural Center (600 River St)

This is the legendary frog design party you've always been hearing about. Officially kick off the 16th year of SXSW Interactive at this unforgettable party

A curated list of things to do at SxSW; Friday, March 13th

SxSW Interactive has over 200 sessions this year. If you’ve never been there it can be a bit overwhelming. There’s also a bunch of ancillary, off the grid events, that occur around SxSW. It’s always great to know what’s going on at those events too.

Here’s a few things I’ll be checking out this year.

Barcamp Austin 4

This event is a staple of my SxSW experience, it will occur over three days this year and details on the event can be found here.

SxSW Panels and Parties

SCHED*SXSW is a great resource to plan your own SxSW schedule or you can use mySXSW. Here are some things I’m looking at.

Friday, March 13

Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong
Room A
Friday, March 13th
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design's print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.

Dan Willis Consultant, Sapient

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development
Room Day Stage
Friday, March 13th
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Add this to your SXSW Calendar

What do the Adobe Flex and ActionScript compilers; the award-winning 3D Flash library, Papervision3D; the native data format for Flash, SWX; and the excellent Flash streaming and interactive server, Red5 have in common? They're all open source. And they're all introduced in this book by the project leads themselves.Contrary to its popular perception as a closed platform, the Flash Platform has an active and thriving grassroots open source community and a plethora of open source projects. In this session, Aral Balkan, founder of OSFlash.org and creator of SWX, will give you an overview of what's possible with open source Flash with examples from the book.

Aral Balkan CEO,   Naklab

TechSet Blogger Lounge, Sponsored by Windows Mobile - Austin Suite
Friday, 3:00pm to 5:00pm

This year we have something very special lined up for the 2009 SXSWi, and your presence is formally requested. Join us at The TechSet blogger lounge sponsored by Windows Mobile to collaborate and celebrate everyday during the conference. We're assembling an agenda rich with activities, entertainment, and resources to make this year unforgettable, fun, and also productive. Drinks, snacks, and all you can eat broadband provided. Follow @techset and @wmdev on Twitter for all the latest news.

The TechSet Meets The Rat Pack at SXSWi
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
The Belmont Lounge (305 W 6th St)

Come enjoy the unique and stylish period-specific décor that conjures scenes from Las Vegas and Palm Springs during the Sinatra era. You'll be surrounded by incredible and pioneering entrepreneurs and influencers as we create our own Rat Pack rich with relationships that will propel us long after the curtain closes on SXSWi 09. Hosted by TechSet and Windows Mobile.

Where you aware? Things you didn’t know Microsoft did.

Apologies to John Hodgeman but sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that Microsoft has some folks that are doing special things that sometimes go un-noticed. Our MIX Online Team is one of them. Here are some of the things they are working on. What’s wonderful about all of these efforts is that they are freely downloadable, open source, and immediately useable prototypes with no strings attached.

Oxite
^new!

Our Homegrown Content Management Platform

Oomph

Our Microformats Approach

A Website Named Desire

A Look At What It Takes To Launch A Website

Descry
^{coming soon!}

Exploring Data and Information Visualization

Bill Who?

Okay, so if you don’t know who Bill is, he’s the guy that wrote this:

It’s more or less a bible for what user experience needs to be in the enterprise and was called the best innovation book of the year by the guys over at strategy-business.com

Bill is also a guy that has a strong design influence throughout Microsoft. He’s far from the only guy providing leadership and vision but if you think folks like Scott Guthrie are gurus of grace and technology (and he is of course) but wonder, “Where is the ‘designer’ Scott Guthrie in Microsoft Bill Buxton is THAT guy. It’s fantastic having him at MIX and I promise that you’ll have tangible facts and see visible efforts that his work is having an impact at Microsoft.

How are ‘we’ talking about Bill at MIX?

Bill Buxton to Keynote @ MIX09

The MIX09 Keynote team is thrilled to announce that Bill Buxton will keynote at MIX this year! For those of you who aren’t in-the-know, Bill joined Microsoft Research in 2005 as a Principal Researcher, but his ground-breaking contributions to the fields of human-computer interaction, computer graphics and the application of technology to design, filmmaking and music began early in his career.

Read more about his fascinating work and life on his web site: http://www.billbuxton.com.

Bill’s resume is only a part of why we’re so thrilled that he accepted our offer to keynote at MIX09. The other part is his philosophy on designing software, and for that matter, designing anything. To quote Bill’s personal mantra:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name. –Bill Buxton