We asked Julia Stowell, open source community and marketing manager for Microsoft, to tell us a bit more about Open Source Week. Stowell has ten years of IT industry experience, specifically at Microsoft. She has experience in marketing and community management and business and market analysis.

How did the idea for Open Source Week come about?

… This is our (Microsoft’s) third time hosting Make Web Not War.  Last year we held the event in Montreal and as part of the lead up to our event we helped to organize an Open Source Week in Montreal.  When we were  visiting Vancouver last October for the Drupal Summit we asked the tech community if they’d be interested in having an Open Source Week. They were enthusiastic and supportive and so we continued the conversation.  And here we are.  The community in Vancouver is awesome and we’re thrilled to have been part of the creation of  the first Open Source Week in Vancouver.

Why are you passionate about Open Source Week?

I’m passionate about it because it helped me to get involved and get to know the local tech community.

What do you think specific events happening during Open Source Week will achieve?

This is a great opportunity to have people come together that don’t normally talk to each other.  There are many brilliant people that need to meet each other.

What impact do you think Open Source Week is going to have in the long and short term?

Both long and short term, I think it will trigger more mingling, learning, and networking between the various open source communities.

Which event and which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing from?

Well, I’m partial, but Make Web Not War — specifically my session (LOL),  which is a panel on Microsoft and Open Source.

Make sure to register sooner rather than later and before April 20 — it’s already 70 per cent sold out!

MWNW explores new web standards, mixed web environments, interoperable applications, and PHP on Windows and Azure. The conference is all about bridging the gap between different platforms, communities, and developers no matter trade or background.

At MWNW you’ll be able to schmooze and hob nob with some of the best web developers in the Canada and other leaders in the Canadian web community.  It’s a gathering of visionary industry experts and leaders who build on open source platforms including WordPress, mobile, cloud and commercial software. Listen to what they have to say and ask your own questions. You never know what you might learn.

The conference offers hands-on workshops for those interested in becoming more web savvy. Feel like challenging yourself? Take part in the Code  Your Art Out competition, which started March 1 and runs to June 1, and win up to $15,000, not to mention top notch peer recognition. If that’s not enough fun and excitement for you then head right over to the interactive lounge where you can play with new, cutting edge and innovative toys for as long as you want.

Code Your Art Out

Best of all: you’ll have access to the hottest VIP after party, held at Raw Canvas. Did we mention the free drinks?

If you need further enticement to join the conference (and the party) here are some impressive stats from the 2010 MWNW that might sway you: #webnotwar was the number one trending topic in Canada May 27 2010 with 100 per cent positive social mentions. There were 2,443 event related tweets, 2.4 million followers reach and 859 re-tweets on Twitter (report by Radian6).

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

From time to time, a company comes out with a brilliant product: clean, sleek, easy to use, and down right sexy. However, something even more rare and interesting than this is the halo brand – a brand that can do no wrong and spits out brilliant products. One worth mentioning is Apple.

Apple has proved themselves with their strong product success rate and high rate of user satisfaction. As with the case with the iPhone, just the mention of Apple creating a mobile phone created organic buzz, spin-off fan sites, and skyrocketing demand for a product that was just in the idea stage. Ultimately, few were disappointed with the final product. But the rarity lies in the amount of trust consumers vest in Apple. Everything they touch turns to cool. If Apple started selling re-bar, you would see trend setters carry around the various Apple colours like a patriot waving his flag.

Microsoft, oh Microsoft, is in a very different, and far less attractive boat. Take the Zune for example. Zune, their attempt at an iPod killer, does have superior technical specifications; but it just lacks. Brown as a core colour? Brown??

A cow in a pretty red dress is still a cow. The parent brand, plagued by “blah” publicity of their product launches and a growing increase in the love-to-hate attitude, falls flat by trying too hard to appear cool. You can’t create cool. Especially if the vision of cool is brown.

I don’t hate Microsoft or at least I don’t currently – that may change with the user experience that I’ve had as of late. I have plenty of friends that curse Microsoft and every move they make. And I am beginning to understand why. There are a multitude of reasons to hate microsoft – Vista, Zune, their corporate anti-trust issues to name just a couple.

Hotmail is my personal email carrier. This has more to do with the fact that I’ve had this email address since 2000 than my actual email preference. I would forward this address to a gmail account, but I can’t seem to find an easy way to do this. They let me forward the email, but it seems that it has to be to another Microsoft email property. I can live with this. It’s super annoying since hotmail is not supported by my iPhone, but if this is the only real issue I have with it, I can overlook this transgression.

Having said this, for my personal IM client, I use Windows Live Messanger. In order to sync my work email chat client with my personal IM, I use pidgin. I find that this works wonders (props to the open source community for this – I love you guys). This is great when I’m at work, but when I’m at home, I just use MSN.

I am a bit of an internet junkie. I am addicted to checking my email, twitter, facebook, digg, you get the idea. When I find something I particularly like, I share it. I’ll add it to my FaceBook, twitter feed, etc. This is also true for funny youtube videos. This is why what happened next really bothered me. I was MSNing with a friend this weekend and wanted to share a youtube video that I found particularly amusing. I send him the link and what do you know, the link wouldn’t work.

A quick search on Google and a trip to digg found that I wasn’t the only person experiencing this problem – an entire forum thread had been devoted to this new issue with 110 entries at the time of writing this post. My upset over this really rather trivial issue gets me to the point of this post. Below is just a couple of the comments left on the digg post.

• Welcome to the world of CENSORSHIP! So who’s up for a horde of angry emails to Microsoft? I’m writing one now ”

• URL for complaints: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey= … Digg! Unite! Complain!
• not just youtube. Deviantart.com, googlepages.com and xanga are also affected. -_- Anyone found other urls?

• I’m about to boycott MSN and start using AIM. I suggest people to do the same.

• Wow, I usually stand by Microsoft, but this is unprecedented censorship. Unbelievable, time to change clients.
• http://www.betadaily.com/2008/05/10/microsoft-star …”This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on messenger.”This is why it isn’t affecting me in the UK and many other countries.

This is just a couple of the hundreds of comments you can find on this issue. But, they get the point across. A company really needs to consider and understand why its consumer uses its services. Microsoft by changing the way people can use their product are upsetting their customer and alienating their core user base. And absent of any announced reason for the issue, the users are coming up with their own reason for the issue. It is actions like this, that will drive people from using a companies product straight into the arms of their competitors.

The next time I have a choice between using a Microsoft product or that of one of their competitors, I will remember the extremely poor user experience I’ve had with their apparent censorship and will more than likely choose that of their competitor. So keep this in mind when you are changing the way that your product works on your consumer…or it may come back to haunt you.

**Update:

It appears that the issue has been fixed, but the damage has already been done.

Reminds me of those snap pictures of Britney Spears drinking Coke while she was a Pepsi spokesperson. In Ballmer’s house, rebellion is Google.Com.

Oh, and they’re not allowed to use iPods, either.