Hi, Mike Nash here. I had the opportunity to deliver the Windows 7 keynote yesterday at the annual Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Global Summit here in Seattle. Every year we have the privilege of hosting over 1,400 members from our MVP community in a multi-day summit where we do deep drill downs on our products and get very direct feedback from them. This year the product and engineering groups hosted 700 sessions across 70 Microsoft technology areas, presenting over 140 sessions focused on Windows 7, IE8 and Windows Live expertise areas.
MVPs are independent technical experts and early adopters of Microsoft technologies who voluntarily share their knowledge and experiences in offline and online technical communities to help other technology users to solve problems, discover new capabilities and get the most from their technology investments.
Our MVP community as a whole, represents more than 90 countries, speaks 30 different languages, and covers more than 85 Microsoft technologies.
We have thousands of MVPs around the world, with hundreds who are specifically focused on the Windows Desktop Experience, Windows System and Performance, Internet Explorer, Digital Media, Media Center, Printing and Imaging, Tablet PC and more. We rely on them heavily to be our critics and infuse our conscience with how customers are experiencing the Windows client operating system while sharing insights into how we can continue to improve our products and most importantly the customer experience.
Our MVPs have been very engaged in testing and reviewing the Windows 7 Beta, since our first pre-release build was made available at PDC and our feature complete beta that was released at CES in January. MVPs have provided support by contributing to over 40,000 posts on the Windows 7 Beta Forum where technical enthusiasts can find answers to questions with MVP subject experts contributing to an 85+% answer rate during the beta timeframe. More importantly, MVPs are the one group that has an official feedback channel to file their bugs and input feedback directly to the product and engineering teams.
To date, our MVP community has provided great feedback from their voice of the customer perspective to help us deliver on the next milestone of Windows 7.
I want to say THANK YOU to ALL our MVPs for their hard work in helping us to fine tune Windows 7 and put the final fit and finish on the product as we march to our next milestone of a release candidate.
In closing, we had a bit of fun at the MVP Summit producing an “I’m a PC” MVP video with the keynote audience with myself and Steve Ballmer. Have a look.
– Mike
