Session with Qi Lu
This article was first written on May 13, 2016. With Qi’s departure from Microsoft, I found it refreshing to revisit the session with him, and find renewed inspirations from him. Good luck Qi in your future endeavor.
As part of my COS448 experience we were very fortunate to have Qi Lu from Microsoft calling today for a casual fireside chat. Below is some takeaways I jotted down.
1. What are the three most useful things that you learned from this guest speaker or session that you didn’t know before, or that you hadn’t thought about much before, and that you think you are likely to carry with you going forward?
The first thing I learned is Qi’s view on innovation, “product is the core, technology is the foundation, business is the make-or-break” — it’s only by intersecting the three inter-related areas together, finding the common denominator among human desirability, technology feasibility and business viability, that we can find a sustainable product that is wanted by consumers and profitable. All business ventures and product developments need to focus on testing these three areas before coming to any conclusions.
Secondly, I learned that in the life cycle of innovation, Qi thinks that the most difficult challenge lies in “Go-to-Market”: it’s vital for business to expose the product to the maximum right audience at the right time as fast as possible, and there is as much technicality, expertise and complexity as luck in its success.
Thirdly, I found the stories he shared, both about Yahoo and Microsoft, very interesting and enlightening. Especially on the browser war, I didn’t even think deep enough about the essence of our online experience, and Qi teased out his take as the experience is closely tied to search (which dictates discovery, access and interaction processes). As I’m developing apps for this class and thinking about mobile options, it’s imperative that I understand what WWW really means to users.
2. What surprised you most?
It surprised me a lot when Qi said Microsoft had won the browser war by having a superior product Internet Explorer (because of its expandability and compatibility), and I, being a millennial, was like “when did this happen?” I guess Microsoft had won the war in the sense that it defeated Netscape in market share — yet the victory was brief, and no one today would certainly regard IE as a good product (even Microsoft itself, since it has publicized Edge, an IE replacement, a great deal).
3. What did you like most about the speaker or the session?
Qi’s insight and organization (as seen from his slides) impressed me a lot — and his observation of the industry resonated with me and taught me a great deal. What do you think of Microsoft? It’s gotten so big that I struggle to find a single adjective to sum up my impression of Microsoft; yet it’s amazing how Microsoft seems to have reinvented itself and remained relevant for so long.