Steve Sinofski's Good Bureaucracy Post

Office Sr VP Steve Sinofski blogged about Bureaucracy: good? bad? both?. 

I like to think that two examples of how Office invests in helpful process are Windows Installer (technology) and Windows Installer XML (authoring language, built largely by Office deployment alums). 

Technology:
Windows Installer (MSI) was invented in Office as a way to provide compelling deployment features for consumers and corporatations.  Part of the reason I loved working in Office is fantastic way it's willing to complete the scenarios even if it has to build stuff that might have been better provided in the operating system (another example Watson https://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=118317)

Authoring:
As Rob noted in his philosophical musings about building setup for software the developer that wrote the feature knows best how to finish the feature.  This is quintensential Office (sp?  note: need a word blogger so poor spellers like me can get spell check) .

VBLs
Another thing Office12 got right is the Feature Crews VBLs rather than the Windows-based VBLs as Office's approach focuses on customer features and experiance regaurdless (sp? again ;^) of the org chart where my experiances in other parts of Microsoft base their VBLs strictly off org chart, not customer features.  (Oh lord, do I miss ohome, ocheck, osetup, and the rest of the developer infrastructure from Stephan.)

Office doesn't have every thing right but it was much more direct to provide customer value than I've found elsewhere in Microsoft.