BlurNotes: Sean O’Driscoll, MS MVP & Ugly Babies

[Sean O'Driscoll [l] with unidentifiable beer-drinking blogger. Photo by Jim Storer]

[NOTE: I am interviewing people for my new book Blurring Boundaries, about enterprise online communities. While I hope to report on many communities. I plan to go into particular depth with  five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.]

Sean O’Driscoll is co-founder and of Ant’s Eye View, a Seattle-based consulting firm that helps large companies with the strategic and planning aspects of social customer engagement. He was at Microsoft for 15 years, where he is best-remembered for developing MVP [Most Valuable Professionals] a small, highly active network comprised of Microsoft's most passionate product users.

MVP goes back to 1992, predating both Sean and social media. It was started by people in Microsoft's support organization to reward product champions. They used the conversational technologies of the time, CompuServe and Usenet newsgroups.

When Sean took the reigns in 2002, Microsoft was facing an unprecedented  challenge, not from a competing software company, but from a groundswell movement in the developer community. It was called open source and it would soon permanently disrupt the packaged software industry.

Sean was a member of the Microsoft strategic team designated to explore solutions.

He spent a month studying Linux online communities.Like Microsoft's they were mostly centered around technology and support issues. Like Microsoft, question got answered usually promptly and well.

But he noticed a "radical disparity in customer return rates." In Microsoft spaces, people came,  got what they wanted and left. In open sources spaces, people kept coming back. They stuck around and shared information, ideas and anecdotes.

In Sean's view, return rates were indicative of community health. "On the whole Linux communities were substantially healthier than on Microsoft spaces,:" when measured by return rate, Sean concluded.

This led him to his Ugly Baby Principal.

If you happen to be an American Idol TV show fan, you probably already know that from time-to-time, the show features, as Sean put it, " a whole lot of singers who really suck. Some of them know they really suck, but don't care." They love to sing. But, a significant percent of these bad singers don't  know they really suck."

If you ask them, many would say that their parents had always told them they could sing.

That, Sean observed, is because parents will overlook dramatic faults in their kids.

He felt this was what Microsoft was on product functionality and engineering was missing about the Linux groundswell.

"We simply didn't understand that the Linux community was fired up not on product aspects but on emotions. They didn't care if their kid was ugly, it was their baby and everything it did was beautiful," he said. "We were trying  to compete on functionality, not realizing open source popularity was emotional."

This was not something that Microsoft could easily combat. "We couldn’t change our culture. We were a mind company not a heart company," he told me, and the Linux movement was heart-based

The best Microsoft could do was to tap into fans of Microsoft technology. Sean sought out and recruited 300 of the company's most passionate users. It's important to note that their passion--and loyalty was not for the Microsoft. They are not company evangelists and at times they have actually been among Redmond's harshest critics.

Their loyalty is to the technology and to the people who use it. The are users themselves and it seems to be their nature to want to help other users. They are motivated by recognition, not rewards such as points or tee shirts.

"The fact that MVPs are extremely helpful to Microsoft as a company is just a lucky side effect," Sean said. Not only do MVPs provide superior tech support to other users, they provide an extremely high-quality of feedback on design, features and functions and they do it dynamically all the time.

The MVP social network is not a replacement for phone-based support, which is live, has one-on-one dynamics and hold the hands of the most frustrated end users.

But web-based MVP support has a very special asset. It is public. Other see the support being given.  They see people helping people. In phone support the only time you seem to hear about incidents are the disasters, not the successes.

The fact remains, however, that at the end of the day cultures are more difficult to change than products and market strategies. Microsoft is a culture built on engineering. It makes products designed by committees.

It simply cannot replicate the emotions and passions that lovers of ugly babies generate.

MVP, at least, has allowed Microsoft at least to understand the value of passionate users and community sharing . Not only that but MVPs have probably helped Microsoft refine and improve the products they bring to market.

Since Sean left, MVP has grown to 4000 users worldwide. What remains to be seen is if the community can scale to 50,000 to 60,000 users and if it does, will Microsoft  turn itself inside out so that communities of passionate users will change the companies process of making products, policies and programs that least will get more people to love their ugly babies.