IDG Contributor Network: Office 365 'Coming Soon' feature heralds a new era of user engagement
[Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author.]
One of the common mistakes made by companies is that both they and their customers often take upgrades and improvements for granted. They don’t promote them, we as users often don’t use them and, even if we do, unless the changes are heavily marketed we tend to take these changes in stride and devalue them.
This is a problem when a competitor emerges or when it comes time to upgrade to a new version of a product, because we’re likely to try the competing product or avoid the upgrade…because we don’t see the value of either the existing product or the improved offering.
Apparently, Microsoft is moving to address this problem with something called the “Coming Soon” preview pane. I recently received this as a heads-up as part of my Office 365 subscription. I’m intrigued with the idea, because it seems to address the problem of folks taking Outlook for granted. If successful, I expect this capability to move to the rest of Office and become a far more common practice both within Microsoft and other firms as well.