Comments on: Not so much "Lovin it"

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:47:47 +0000

Great, thanks for bringing this to the thread M3!

sean

By: Satisfy Me : Unsolicited business proposals to Microsoft: there is a way

Satisfy Me : Unsolicited business proposals to Microsoft: there is a way — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:24:28 +0000

[…] friend, Sean, has a post from January on how he’s not feelin’ the love so much from McDonald’s, specifically how the company doesn’t accept unsolicited […]

By: M3 Sweatt, Microsoft

M3 Sweatt, Microsoft — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:33:48 +0000

Actually, Sean, Microsoft _does_ have a place for people to submit unsolicited proposals https://members.microsoft.com/omc/Welcome.aspx The Opportunity Management Center (OMC) was set up to provide potential partners with a managed way to submit business proposals to Microsoft.”Preliminary feedback and next steps will be communicated by email within 15 business days. “The Proposal Submission Tool guides you through the submission process. For additional information or details about the process, please review the FAQ or other program resources listed in the left navigation bar.”

By: Kathleen Anderson

Kathleen Anderson — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:42:06 +0000

Along the same lines, Target Tells a Blogger to Go Away http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/business/media/28target.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

“Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets,” a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.

By: John Eddy

John Eddy — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:39:27 +0000

It isn’t an insane policy. I mean, in a litigious society, you run into too many issues.

1) The person submitting the idea might get some ideas of their own when the company takes said idea and makes millions upon millions of dollars off of the idea.

2) If said idea causes a lawsuit against the company by a consumer (say, for instance, a new coffee cup design has a major failure), the company may turn around and put a lawsuit against the person submitting the idea.

Also, looking at some of the other reasons why McDonald’s refuses unsolicited product ideas, there’s a very good reason there: The amount of time it takes to preprocess the idea. Believe me, I’ve triaged enough bugs at Microsoft to see that the majority of them had already been submitted by someone else. The lack of a good search engine on that front caused a major expenditure in hours for someone to actually review the bugs and make sure they weren’t duplicates.

Oh, and sorry to burst your bubble Sean, but MS does in fact have such a policy about unsolicited ideas. http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.mspx#EVE

Now, there is a tremendous difference between *solicited* feedback and *unsolicited* feedback.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:09:20 +0000

Microsoft has no such policy…The challenge is more likely that there are too many ways to give suggestions and feedback which makes idea management and follow up difficult. http://connect.microsoft.com/ is one such visible place.

sean

By: Jorge Diaz (MVP)

Jorge Diaz (MVP) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:50:56 +0000

some months ago I saw something similar with Apple. I think that few companies (like Microsoft) have real ears to listen the customers.

By: Richard Costall

Richard Costall — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:00:10 +0000

Around 12 years ago, I storyboarded an idea for a theme park ride based around Toy Story and sent it to Disney - the response I got was basically the above, Mickey couldn’t use unsolicited ideas

Whats Microsoft’s stance on this kind of thing?