14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has changed its strategy ever since Windows 8.1 was officially announced, with outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer and several other top executives within the company claiming that Redmond is now much more interested in customer feedback.
The tech giant has reiterated the same idea in a post on future Excel Web App improvements, explaining that most of the improvements it makes are based on your opinions.
The SkyDrive Customer feedback and the Office 365 customer/company feedback are playing key roles in the way web-based services are going to look like in the coming years.
“Office 365 has the same feedback mechanisms as SkyDrive for users, but there are also cases where we work with large companies on agreements for hundreds or even thousands of users,” the company said in a blog post.
“Sometimes, companies decide not to go with Office 365 (because they go with the desktop version of Office, or sometimes a competitor), and in those cases, we capture the list of any features in Excel Web that would have resulted in a successful sale.”
The Softies admitted that some of these improvements came from within the company, but users’ opinions are much more important these days. So here’s how the company chooses what to do next for Office Web Apps:
Feature Importance = (Competitive Standing) * (Weight X) + (SkyDrive Feedback) * (Weight Y) + (Office 365 Feedback) * (Weight Z) + (Usage Data) * (Weight P) + (Internal Factors) * (Weight R)
“Every few months, we take these inputs, score each feature based on them, and then build up a formula – in Excel :) – that ranks the features in terms of importance. Of course, we still apply a bit of internal ordering and weighting (for engineering efficiency, or to align with other Office initiatives, etc.), but for the most part, we work down the list based on real customer data (your feedback!),” it concluded.