How Microsoft eats its own dogfood
ENT News | at | by Mike
Every time Microsoft rolls out a major new enterprise product, the software giant claims itself as a long-running early adopter in production systems. At MEC 2002 in Anaheim, Calif., Microsoft corporate vice president and CIO Rick Devenuti explained how his IT department reconciles its top priority of being "Microsoft's best and first customer" with its more standard role of making sure employees in this global Fortune 500 company always have access to the applications they need to do the jobs that keep the revenue flowing.
"Internally we use the term, 'Eating our own dogfood,'" Devenuti said of the company's efforts to use beta releases of its flagship software in production systems. Such dogfood eating only became a top priority for Microsoft's IT group three years ago, he says.