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“I lost my girlfriend’s phone number.”

  • Articolo

Never underestimate the value of a catchy title. This entry is about Longhorn, though—specifically the work we are doing in People and Groups to bridge contact lists--not only between application, but between devices.

 

My good friend Jeremy, a PM on the IE team, came into my office on Thursday asking if I’ve seen his phone. He couldn’t find it. The funny part: he had no way to get a hold of his girlfriend. The only place he had her number was on his phone. Ironically, I had a related conversation the day before. I was eating noodles at a local restaurant and a group of nice young ladies invited me to join them for dinner. When one of them pulled out her cell phone I immediately went into user research mode.

 

Me: How many people do you have on your cell phone?

Her: I had 120, but I just cleaned it out. Now I have about 100.

 

Me: What would you do if you lost your phone?

Her: That happened to me once and it was tragic. Now I type the important people into an Excel spreadsheet so I don’t lose them.

 

When people I know lose their mobile devices, they are usually more upset about loosing their address list than of loosing an expensive toy.

 

“But Kevin,” you might ask, “What does this have to do with Longhorn?”

 

Great question. The people on my team are doing a great deal of work to make sure mobile devices (most importantly cell phones) integrate in powerful and useful ways with the Longhorn People and Group platform.

 

Last month our Development Manager gave a talk at WinHec entitled Communications In “Longhorn”: Telephony, Mobile Devices And HW/SW Integration. (PowerPoint slides)

 

The scenario target: One unified address book on all of my devices and communications applications.

 

I have contacts spread across three lists: my Outlook address book, my Messenger contact list, and my cell phone. They are not kept in sync. In the case of my phone, they are not backed up.

 

Wouldn’t it be cool if when I added a person to my contact list in Messenger I could easily add them to my cell phone? Wouldn’t it be great if loosing me cell phone didn’t mean I had to email all of my friends and ask them for their phone number (and hope you run into the people for whom you don’t have an email address?) Loosing your phone should be a great experience, because it gives you an excuse to get a Pocket PC Phone Edition.

 

Sadly, none of the members of the P&G sync team are blogging (yet). Free to post your comments, questions, and horror stories. I’ll pass them along.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2004
    If this person was running one of the smartphones, this wouldn't be an issue. I don't see this as something the OS has to solve.

    I have a Treo 600, and my phone book goes into Outlook or anywhere else I want when I HotSync. Presumably the WinCE phones work the same way, if someone wants to go that way.

    I also know that with the Nokia phones, you can download a free app that lets you download (not hotsync) the phone's databases via an IR connection. The other manufacturers may have similar solutions. Granted, this is one of those no-immediate-gratification kinds of things like making backups of your hard drive.
  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2004
    Of course if you have all your stores synchronized it also means that if you accidentally delete somebody's number you lose it for good, unless you have a paper based contact list as well, not synchronized with your other lists. And I can't imagine that I would have all my work's list on my cell phone (which I do in my Outlook address book). It wouldn't even fit.
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    Sounds like people want somethink like iSync in MacOS X. I'm amazed with all MS's resources that they're so far behind.
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    Once again, this is wholesale theft by Microsoft of Apple computer's intellectual property. iSync has been around for over a year, and MS will copy it in Longhorn in what...2008? 2009? LOL!
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    iSync is available now. No need to wait for Longhorn.
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    Hmmm...so Brendan copies Kuddler who copies Andy who copies Wiser who copies a different Kevin. Big deal, everyone builds on top of everyone else.

    It's not like Apple invented the idea of synching data across devices. Windows 2000 has had IntelliMirror roaming profile synchronization, Windows XP had sync folders, ActiveSync synched everying...blah...blah...blah. The real question is what problems are there to be solved and the original Kevin's looking to build on data and experiences to to do it well.

    I guess one of the data points is that Apple has some synch functionality that upon discussion tends to bring out the sarcastic and vitriolic sides of its customers. Longhorn should try not to agitate its users in the same way ;)
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004
    Kevin, you're suffering from priority inversion here. You should really be blogging about what you did to get a group of nice young ladies to invite you to join them for dinner.
  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004
    The comment has been removed