Josh Ledgard, a program manager at Microsoft, has an interesting blog entry: “Ten Insane Ideas for Microsoft.” Some of it is pretty mundane, like towel service, but he makes a few great points:
1. The “2 Secrets†Rule
So, I propose the “2 secrets†rule. Every VP must tell their groups what the two protected secrets are and that everything else is fair game to talk to customers about.
Two is small enough that everyone will remember what’s off-limits and there would probably be even less risk of those two things leaking since everyone would know what they are.
7. Every Microsoft project should be considered “Open Source†for every other MS employee.
Every product at Microsoft should be considered open source fair game for the rest of the company. This doesn’t mean open source for the world… lets just start with open source within our walls. :-) And it goes beyond source code.
It seems strange to people in Devdiv, where we have a public bug database, but there are several Microsoft projects I can’t even get permission to report bugs to their database or view their plans without knowing the special handshake. Sure, I could e-mail the team, but why should I waste their time by e-mailing them duplicate bugs if I could just add my information to existing reports? Just make sure I know what your “two secrets†are.
Some of this is stuff Google is already doing. It’s certainly worked for them.