{"id":92931,"date":"2016-01-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=92931"},"modified":"2019-03-13T10:29:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T17:29:19","slug":"20160126-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20160126-00\/?p=92931","title":{"rendered":"Some senior executives are afraid to provide feedback, because they know that their feedback will be given too much weight"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recall a conversation I had with Steve Sinofsky, back when he was in charge of Windows. As you might expect, he gets to see early versions of a lot of things, his laptop is running dogfood<\/a> everything, and everybody is asking for feedback. <\/p>\n

And he rarely gives any.¹ <\/p>\n

Not because he’s a jerk, but because he understands that if he provides any feedback, it will get magnified from an idea to a suggestion to a recommendation to a direct order<\/a>.² <\/p>\n

“Why isn’t there a Frobnicate button right next to the Widget? The main reason I go to that page is to find a Widget to frobnicate.” <\/p>\n

This becomes “Steve wants to add a Frobnicate button right next to the Widget”, and then “Steve says we have to add a Frobnicate button right next to the Widget”. <\/p>\n

I guess, if he is moved to make a suggestion or share an idea, he can mention it to somebody and add “Tell the XYZ team, but don’t tell them it came from me.” I don’t know if that’s what he actually does. <\/p>\n

¹ Presumably he gives feedback on the functionality as a whole, but today I’m talking about feedback on the level of feature requests or tweaks, like how the UI should be laid out, or the order of the pages in a wizard, or whether a wizard should be used at all. <\/p>\n

² I hesitate to mention that at the time Exchange was being developed, the Ctrl<\/kbd>+F<\/kbd> standard did not yet exist<\/i>. Try it: Fire up your archived copy of Windows 95, launch Notepad or Wordpad or whatever, and hit Ctrl<\/kbd>+F<\/kbd>. Nothing happens. At the time, the standard hotkey for Find was F3<\/kbd>. (And, in fact, many applications today still accept F3<\/kbd> as a shortcut for Find.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excess baggage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-92931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Excess baggage.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}