EDC 668 Blog Post - Week #5

How does motivation translate into technology design and success? Think of an example successful technology, and share how motivation was a factor in its success.

Motivation can be translated into technology towards the design and success by witnessing a problem/flaw in a product and making significant changes to show mass improvements compared to a previous version.  One of the best, personal examples that I can give to describe how the technology and motivation were meshed to become successful was when I was a Lead Supportability Program Manager for Internet Explorer 5.0 back in the mid-90s. Imagine browsing on the Internet with only Netscape 3.0/4.0 and competing (playing catch-up to compete in the browser space).  Being on this team was great because I was able to obtain feedback from customers on a regular basis to provide this feedback to the product group (key developers) and make changes within a matter of hours/days ahead of our scheduled release dates announced to the public.  IE 4.0 was okay and it placed a small dent into the share of the browser wars with Netscape but it wasn't acceptable.  As the IE team, we realized that our user experience had to better and that we had to be able to browse at least 95 to 100% of the web pages that were available faster than Netscape without crashing as well as make sure that the browser setup was smaller than our previous version (IE 4.0).

To make a long story short, our reviews for IE 5.0 were very promising and positive compared to Netscape because we were motivated to fix the issues that we saw with the previous version that were just "not good" for our customers.  The key feature that was requested by many users was to incorporate Print Preview and WYSIWYG support for web pages to print as it appeared on the screen.  Once this was incorporated for IE 5.0, we were "golden" and our customers and investors showed us a lot of love.  Again, the IE 5.0 team was motivated by making our customers happy by providing a great product and not worrying too much about just putting something out there to compete.  We actually fixed 98.9 percent of the issues that were reported/duplicated by our customers and we had lesser phone calls than any previously released web browser.  The key to success is to provide clear communication and goals to motivate others to do their best work.  Hey, the general manager providing us dinner and snacks helped alot on those long days/nights helped to motivate us, too. (smile)