You've all seen Microsoft's Virtual Earth, seen all the postings, watched the commentary about Scoble and his hands being tied re: pre-announcing products, etc, etc.
There are nuggets in this beta that can help you with your own launch.
Missing Features
Typing in Toronto gets you to Toronto, OH not Toronto, Canada. The map moves off where I was to this Ohio location which is annoying (map should stay put until I change it). Clearly there is a gaping hole called Canada when it comes to searching for locations. Beta. BE-TA, I got it.
The Virtual Earth Team said they were starting with the US and then expanding. No problem for me. I'm leaving my favorites set for Google maps until such time, etc, etc..
There is no place in Virtual Earth or the developer site, or the blogs, etc, where there is a list of what's coming and a place to sign up for notification when the feature I'm looking for is available. Something as large as country search does not fall into pre-announcing features, FUD, and all of that stuff.
Lesson: Acknowledge what's obviously missing and offer a friction free (RSS/Email) way for me to sign up and get notification of the improvements I care about. The general blog for Virtual Earth isn't going to cut it because tips for searching phone numbers aren't useful until I can use the product in Canada. So, very focused announcements or the like is what I need.
Feedback/Community
If you click the community option on the main page, you get a window with three core things: Live Voting on a topic, useful links, and the "send us your feedback" boxes.
The feedback boxes limit you to 1000 characters. Normally, I'd ignore this but these days, its worth the rant. MSN's Messenger has a limit in chat, Skype doesn't. A simple text field where you've asked me for feedback should let me type in War and Peace if I so choose.
Limiting this to 1000 characters? Memo to coder: This is not the way to a 4.0 review. Lame.
Additionally, after you submit your feedback (I mentioned the Toronto thing in mine, BTW) you get a note saying "Your feedback has been submitted to the Virtual Earth Team. We're updating Virtual Earth regularly so check back often."
Bzzzt. Wrong, thanks for playing.
First, we forget our manners? T H A N K Y O U was missing. Yeah, roll your eyes. To me, tho, it is core culture. Saying thank you to the person who typed something in should be in the DNA. It should be fixed immediately, two words, no meetings required. Fix this.
Second, check back? I'm a busy guy, you're a busy women, we're all busy. How about you let me know when what I want/need/like is available. See earlier lesson.
Lesson: Remember to say thank you, the customers pay the bills.
Lesson: Make it easy to induce me to come back and try again.
[Bonus Product Management Lesson: If you have some weird 1000 character limitation of your own and the product manager says "yeah, we do that because it keeps people from rambling.." fire them as they've red lined your arrogance meter.]
Put them back on the Treadmill
When you decide to go mano -a- mano with your competition, one of the biggests things you can do is force the other guy into reactionary mode and keep em there.
In search, for example, Google has been kicking the stuffing out of any and all by rolling out features, betas, etc, and forcing others to react to them. For the most part, high level, it's safe to say they own the space (today) and others are reacting to them (today).
Virtual Earth has a number of things you simply can't do with Google Maps. Killer features, amazing (whoa, cool) items that blow away the competition.
Where? I dunno either and that's the point.
The Welcome box talks about "slick new features" with three "pointers" to get you started. One of those pointers is browse the help box. Do that and you get the help box which has, well, help.
Hmm, help on this scratch pad thing...
The scratch pad is pretty slick, actually. It allows you to grab a whole bunch of things, locations, directions, places, whatever into one email (or blog) message. It's very well done. And (lemmie just check to make sure) you can't do this in google's map offering.
You can't today. But if enough customers like it in Virtual Earth, you can bet your latte, the google kids will be all over it, thus making them react to Virtual Earth.
Lesson: Make sure you have a cystal clear "you have to phreaking try this" message about your hot stuff. Get your customers to high five and blog about it because that's what your competition will react to. Force them onto a treadmill of reactions to you and keep them there.
Nits? Maybe. I have a hunch tho, as all of us get continually bombarded with demands on our time and wallet, it will be the little things that matter, big company or small.
[Random Side Note]
I said to my friend as I was finishing this entry up, hmm, I should fool around and place a bet with the blogging world to see how long, if ever, it takes to get the thank you thing fixed.
She says, dead seriously:
"Naah. You do that, Scoble gets it fixed, blogs it, you both have smiley faces, and you end up getting slashdotted for being involved in a giant conspiracy to fake like Microsoft cares about customers which only ends up in Six Degrees sending you a bill for Bandwidth overage thus depriving me of making you pay for lunch."
<me:blank stare>
Check, please!
I've already sent this to the team. Thanks!
By the way, Chandu Thota is on the team and has a great blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/cthota/default.aspx
Posted by: Robert Scoble | July 31, 2005 at 23:28
Thanks for confirming my sanity with respect to the limitations of MSN Virtual Earth; as you know I was involved in a "Local Search" product a few years ago (that ironically was acquired by MapPoint); it gave me lots of feature reference points to look for in "Local Search" tools. Three links to "get started" (and one lead me to donwload a client that is not terribly useful); huh? Google Maps is still the only tool that gives me useable "local search" results. Google Maps leads!
Posted by: Jim Courtney | August 01, 2005 at 23:09