On Coca Cola and secret recipes.
I dont think you should give a preview to webloggers, or the press. Certainly if you do, they should be embargo'd till the PDC (which I expect anyway). All that will happen how is people will see it, and mention something, Then people will read those stories and they'll be an outcry about something, which give it a bad name. Wait till PDC - announce everything there. Have it run on the CommsNet, have it run on the machine Bill uses for his PPT, etc. You know it will be on the internet within HOURS of the cd's being handed out at PDC. Let the Product speak for it's self on the day it's born.
Ahhh, good points. But as with everything in life there is a flipside. Being relentlessly secretive, as say in the case of Apple, whose beta tests are horrid, can be counterproductive. So scared are they of leaks that they never seem to do a full airing out, result being products released in the wild with monumentally elementary mistakes.
In NSA/CIA/DIA communities secrecy is paramount (as it should be), but so is intelligence, the right people having the right info at the right time is critical. A culture of extreme secrecy prevents information from even getting out. Likewise, extreme compartmentalization, prevents same company teams from learning WHAT their own company is doing, result being incompatibilities and turf wars serious, and a tendency to reinvent the wheel. Companies that clamp down internally rampant are no fun to work for, are political viper dens, and that makes even internal discussion stifled. Secrecy to those OUTSIDE, rampant internal secrecy are company killers.
And in some examples, such as Los Alamos Lab or Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the need for data, the science of it all, conflicts with the national interest in preventing foreign governments from stealing information. Lean too hard on one side, you kill it, lean too hard the other way, it also kills it. Balance, tho sometimes nearly impossible, is critically key.
Extreme secrecy defeats the whole purpose of PR. Most companies operate on an NDA thought process and not a market process. The whole idea of not talking to the press, while understandable, more often than not is counterproductive. A little honey goes a long way. A certain risk by being out there, but a far greater risk in hunkering down under the cover of secrecy.
And I am sooooooo tired of hearing about the “Osborne effect”. 
Adam Osborne was hype without delivery. True, it created an inventory glut, but it had been 2 years since the Osborne 1. Had he been more ready in the wings with Osborne 2 it could have soared. Loose lips, yes, but rather a unique situation at the birth of the computer revolution, now taken as gospel when it doesn't really apply anymore. But here's the flipside, when your competitors are fast churning out BETTER products than you, not giving any future direction can sink you. This is a game of one-up-manship, being the tech leader with the best products, in the shortest amount of time, at the best prices, in the most places, wins you the crown. In the cutting edge race, those that do not talk (or at least hint), lose out. An example, tons of people going Acer C110, as they have no indication of where HP is going with its next Tablet. Secrecy is good, in that it prevents others from knowing, but on flipside it has already lost them tons of customers, who will never be back. Granted a way way early market, but a small example.
Here's some of the reasons companies SHOULD NOT keep secrets
1. Keep Competitors at Bay. (Which is WHY there is even talk of Longhorn in the f
Ack, HaloScan limits...
Here's some of the reasons companies SHOULD NOT keep secrets
1. Keep Competitors at Bay. (Which is WHY there is even talk of Longhorn in the first place.)
2. Feedback, Further Development. More Input. You can’t do this in the cover of the night. (More input, is the whole of PDC itself)
3. Create a Buzz, something to talk about. Far greater when you can PLAY with it over mere speculation. For some ‘enthusiast no-life types’ endless talk about a yet unreleased product can and do form a basis for some drama, but hardly a majority.
4. Amplification of PR. Marketingese hype is just that until the goods (or pre-goods) are on the table.
5. Sharing of information. Learning what other teams are doing. Ability to play Strategic games. In the case of Microsoft: Mundie’isms.
6. Being cutting edge. For example: This company has given a ROADMAP that I can PLAN by. Secrets KILL that.
7. Secrecy creates the impression, the view that you are hiding something, that you are not being honest and forthright. That there is always a hidden “gotcha” somewhere in the mix.
One interesting post this week. I thought this wouldn't happen, and was afraid of you talking about house work instead.
I don't think it's about "secret". First of all, I would replace "secret" with "hype" in the post, and re-read it. Funny.
I would go to the next step, mass brainwashing. Clearly exposed with the coming RFIDs (documents have leaked, and show how the opinion is getting manipulated).
Or is it also in the wrong track, and you are only introducing private documents as the next way to communicate messages between people. (it's about NGSCB, of course...).
Remember Windows 95? That was one secret Microsoft didn't try too hard to keep. They kept telling everyone it was nearly ready, even though it was really still in bits on the floor.
The reason? Well, it was to make sure customers weren't tempted to do anything dumb in the meantime, such as making a commitment to IBM's OS/2. Customers could have got a lot of the same useful functionality from that product, which was out almost a year earlier. But Microsoft convinced them that there was something great coming, and that it was better to wait for that.
I think you missed a bit reason companies keep secrets.
It's because software features lists and schedules are mostly preliminary until the beta ships. If you tell people that your new XML editor is going to have a "perfect toast" attachment, your customers are going to be upset if you end up having to cut that because you run out of time, or the toaster company backs out.
You can try to work around this by letting people know what is preliminary, but the "I can't find generics in VS 2003" experience shows that people often get their information second-hand, or aren't listening closely. Ditto "MFC is dead", VB is dead, etc.
Wow, ICQ, what an innovation. I have to laugh every time it's brought up as an example of something world-changing. In November, 1996 they had a product that did what MIT Zephyr had been doing for many years at that point. I started using Zephyr at Carnegie Mellon in summer 1993, and it was a few years old already.
I think there are two ways to go for most organizations: You can either be transparent and do everything openly, or you can be opaque and do everything secretly. Very few companies can actually walk the fine line between transparency and opaqueness well.
One that can - especially nowadays - is Apple. Microsoft is obviously trying to, but the things that they build up to tend to be laughable, as laughable as Steve Ballmer being somehow an inspiring speaker. (Jobs : Passion :: Ballmer : Hype) That doesn't work. When the secrets are out, they actually have to be something new, not a me-too.
Take the vaunted Longhorn affine transform-based and GPU-accelerated display architecture for example. It may wow the Windows crowd, but for some of us it's a total yawn. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt from WWDC2002 and have been using it (Quartz Extreme) daily for almost a year.
And the next SQL Server? Puh-leeze. I strongly doubt it has a better value proposition than FrontBase, especially if it only runs on a platform unsuitable for server us. Wow, it's a slightly better relational database than the one Microsoft sells right now! Stop the presses!
Let me when Microsoft stops trying to hype things that are only new to Windows, and when they start showing passion for thingsthat are truly *new*.
Chris is obviously still getting used to having a modern memory management system to cite one thing Apple has been guilty of overhyping only once it showed up on the Mac. Why do I read Chris's post and think of this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view...date=2002-07-
12
Robert, haven't you forgotten that one :
To make Theft appear like IP
An example ? ClearType.
- MS point of view : BillG comdex 98 : "ClearType is MS research breakthrough", ...
- actual : Apple II, Xerox, ... have worked more than 2 decades ago to do just that, and successfully implemented it in the Apple II display devices, .... More info? here : http://grc.com/ctwho.htm
(Gibson is a former Apple employee and obviously one of the guys behind the technology).
Got it right?
I don't know about the business value of keeping secrets, but this business about Longhorn is getting so very old.
MS is the dominant player in the marketplace, whatever it does will attract attention. All this crap about Longhorn only seems to be setting themselves up for failure, much like the Segway. Which doesn't overly trouble me, but it is boring.
I suspect much of this is about rehabilitating MS's image as an innovator. Or rather, it's about creating an image as an innovator.
The thing is, some day the curtain will rise and we'll get to see what >$45B in the bank, >90% market share, and 55K employees can create; and then we'll go back to being unable to make bullet lists the way we want to in Word.
You say that Longhorn is the worst kept "secret". I don't know about you, but it sounds most like the hype that led up to windows 95. I remember that around the same time OS/2 was scheduled to come out, and MS just kept on publishing hype, how it would do your laundry, buy flowers for your wife, do your homework, etc etc etc. In the end, a lot of customers decided they'd wait for the late and then later software instead of going with OS/2 which was out earlier, was a better product (IMHO) and still was up to the release of w2k or so.
Sometimes I wonder how many of the secrets out there that aren't secrets anymore are just leaked information to help hype up something that's not around yet. If longhorn was really a secret we wouldn't hear about it until it was released.
Chris - re: ICQ
As with other things mentioned (cleartype a couple of comments down) it's not always the first to have a technology that is remembered, but the first to make it big (or do it better). ICQ is a good example of the former, and may have just been a remake of the same technology, but it created such an explosion that one could say that it was the instigator of the IM craze that's going on these days. Google is a good example of the latter, taking the shitty selection of search engines such as altavista and the other search-engine-now-a-portal companies out there and turning the idea into something that worked well and was simple and clean. And guess what, they're considered the search engine, just like xerox is the copier, band-aid(tm) the bandage, etc etc. With ICQ being now 7 years old, that's still quite a feat!
Scoble, Didn't your NDA say that you couldn't talk about the NDA?
>> As with other things mentioned (cleartype a couple of comments down) it's not always the first to have a technology that is remembered, but the first to make it big (or do it better).
If there is prior art, then the MS patents over ClearType are all illegal.
Chris said,
Very few companies can actually walk the fine line between transparency and opaqueness well.
I agree that this is a big challenge, and something MS isn't doing very well at. Traditionally, the way things worked at Microsoft was that marketing picked chose what we would disclose before bits were available, and that's what we did. Marketing has lots of concerns, most of which were covered in the original post.
There are a few unfortunate results of this:
1) Some features that users would like to know about (and comment on) never get discussed because they're in the blanket "don't talk about it" list, even though there isn't any reason we wouldn't talk about it. In other words, marketing would agree to disclose.
2) Developers have it really tough remembering what they can and can't talk about. I know of at least one team that can't talk publicly about what they're doing because it hasn't been disclosed. That makes working with customers less exciting.
I've been working on this with marketing and others in the division, and I think we'll be more rational in this in the future, and won't hold our cards quite as close to our chests.
One more reason for keeping things secret: once you make a feature, strategy or any form of decision public, it is harder to change your mind!
Decisions that are reverted are perceived as weakness or failure.
On the other hand, public annoucements are a commitment that probably help other companies to collaborate and provide feedback.
I guess a strategic annoucement is a strategic decision in itself 
Cheers
Dumky
In Microsoft's defense, which I rarely jump to, promoting vaporware is hardly unusual. Nokia and other cell phone vendors promote phones long before they are available, and I suspect this is common in many industries.
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