Slashdot Mirror
Upstart Bloggers at Microsoft Moving On
SJasperson writes "A few weeks ago Mini-Microsoft decided to stop tweaking his corporate masters, having won the astounding victory of getting free towels returned to the locker rooms in Redmond. Now uber-blogger Scoble is moving on to work with a podcasting startup, having apparently tired of his supposed role as Vista evangelist and self-appointed corporate revolutionary. The company still has 3,000 bloggers left, but Microsoft has apparently figured out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line. There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom."
"There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom."
That the power of the blog can be used to add to the power of the boardroom?
Are there any of those left? ;-)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Does anyone have a chaed version of the page? Seems like the image hoster is hiding the images :(
But I'd be willing to be that blogging increasingly becomes a source for viral marketing where supposedly former disgruntled employees who continually moan about things that don't really matter at a workplace "our monitors are sony! I want a panasonic monitor!!!!!" suddenly become full of praise for said company in a sneaky method of giving said company good PR when they really need it and giving it "any press is good press" type coverage when it just needs brand recognition
WTF, is this some kind of tabloid? What happened to Slashdot?
The very fact that Microsoft (and everyone else) knows how many Microsoft bloggers there are means they are being tracked. If you weren't a 100% believer in the cause it would be very hard to write a blog while working there.
People have gotten into hot water or even gotten fired for years for blogging...check out http://www.dooce.com/ and read her story, if you don't already know it. Being a team player vs. maintaining your own opinion about your company's strategy/your boss's bad moods/your apparent lack of advancement opportunities/etc. is a dilemma that is becoming more common. With blogs and other new Internet media, it's becoming much more tempting to try to have it both ways. Sometimes people don't just want to be a corporate shill.
Homer: Son, you tried, and you failed. The lesson is: Never Try.
That Microsoft put towels back in the locker room? Other than the word "blog", that's about the only event I can discern from that rabid rambling summary. Was this written by the E! Entertainment Network?
Slashdot Flash: Microsoft has put towels in the locker rooms! Full story at 11:00!
Comment of the year
Blogs still have power over the boardroom, but only if the boardroom has no control over them. This means the blog has to be anonymous. Nothing trumps the threat of losing your job.
One blogger stays at the company but takes a blogging break since it was sucking too much of his time, time which he feels would be better spent doing something else. He also says he might be back on the blogging scene, altough we shouldn't count on it.
The other accepted a position at another company, is still praising its (past) employer and is maintaining good relations with them.
So... how exactly is this Microsoft figuring out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line ?
its no fun being a shill when no money comes in from it...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I love how the explanation of why he left the company is completly different from the one of the actual blog, I guess the truth is not important as long as you bash MS.
The point isn't that blogging is going to mean company employees dishing dirt on their bosses. The point is for the company to be engaging in a meaningful dialog with their customers and the communities they operate in. Corporate bloggers can be expected, I think, to have a pro-company viewpoint. But a gernuine conversation can still take place. And that's what corporate blogging is bringing us.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
The question is -- what is left to blog about at Microsoft at the moment anyway? It has all been said. We've seen Vista, and it's a late clone of Mac OS X. We've seen the new Office, and we're going to have relearn a lot. Their stock market performance is a joke, and Ballmer is going to sit on all that money they have instead of giving back to the shareholders or doing something useful. The Xbox 360 looks pretty cool, we know that, too. There don't seem to be any new, exciting products in the pipeline. So what is the point of blogging? This simply is not a sexy company anymore. Give us something to sing about, and we'll sing. Until then...everything has been said. Especially of course if they gave you your towel back...
Who?
There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom.
Like, ohmygod, the real world. I'd better post an entry in my livejournal about how shocked I am! Mood: faint-of-heart *picture of sad kitten*
Please help metamoderate.
Even if one of the examples is an anonymous corporate critic and the other is part of the public marketing face of the company. Even if one is going quiet but continuing to work at Microsoft and the other is going to a software startup but intends to continue evangelism for Microsoft. Even if one claims to be worn out and the other enthusiastic about their position.
I guess /. forgets about MS owning the computers, network and the content produced while on company time and/or using those computers and network.
Scoble was an embarrassment to a lot of folks at Microsoft. Contrary to popular belief, a relative minority "drinks the coolaid" there. Scoble was freakin' SOAKED in cool-aid. He was also blogging about blogging most of the time and sometimes engaged in "I make less money than I could" rhetoric. Good riddance. Let's hope they hire someone less embarrassing to fill his place.
Whisle-blowing is much more fun, than blogging anyhow, especially when Lauren Bacall is your teacher:
Is this sig nificant?
The two examples are as different as chalk and cheese, and I really don't think there's much to be gained from attempting to find an overarching theme.
Mini-Microsoft clearly tapped several seams of unhappiness within Microsoft and found him/herself with an immensely popular blog on his/her hands. After a while, however it became pretty clear that there was only so much that could be written about on those topics, and the blogger clearly didn't relish the idea of being seen as an all-purpose internal Microsoft kicker. Couple that with the suggestions that the anonymous cover had been broken and it is fairly obvious why the fun might have gone out of the venture.
But Scoble? I mean what was the point? The guy never actually seemed to have anything interesting to say; usually it was faintly masterbatory stuff about the power of blogging or how tough it was being Scoble, I took him off my RSS reader after a couple of months when it was clear it was pointless. I would have thought he was simply irrelevant to Microsoft, which is why they aren't too sad to see if off the pay-roll. He came across as a man supremely interested in his own words, but not too bothered about making them particularly interesting to anyone else.
A /. discussion wherein towels are mentioned but no obvious refences? Fine I'll go, to hell with karma.
Any blogger that can post the daily accounts of the corporation he works for, sling mud, point fingers, risk his job and in the end, still have his job all in order to know where his towels are, is a blogger to be reckoned with...
While every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way, any given unhappy family tends to be unhappy in a consistent fashion. While personal security is no doubt a major factor in Mini's decision, another factor may well be that after a few years, there is nothing new to write about: if the corporate culture still does the same stupid things, it is no longer news, and you've already said what you have to say on the matter. Best to quit before you start to sound like a parody of yourself.
I don't get how anyone can boast about a company called Microsoft which steals their ideas (isn't Windows based upon piracy?!?), then again I don't work for Microsoft, and never would want to. Bad enuff I run Windows as is.
Who has time to read corporate lackey blogs? I can barely keep up with the slow-news-day Slashdot postings...
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
Saying that the only victory is the return of the towels is so naive that is appears to be intentionally trolling.
The real victory was the change of the review system. Mini-Msft fought for two primary reasons:
1) To eliminate stack ranking
2) To layoff under performers
If you read the farewell posts at all, you would know that the performance review system has been changed to no longer utilize stack ranking and that clear identification of under performers has been made easier. Whether or not Mini helped, goal #1? rocked it. goal #2? Hopefully going to follow from goal #1
The towels are a symbolic victory. The towel benefit was revoked in an attempt to save money; not even really all that much. There are a fair number of msft/redmond employees who bike to work. The lack of towels actually setup a significant barrier to performance for these people because if they forgot a towel, they need to travel several extra miles to the PRO Club to shower when they could have taken a shower in their building and gotten right to working. The symbolism is that Microsoft's leadership had forgotten the importance of these benefits and reinstated the towels indicating that the loss of productivity or employee satisfaction wasn't worth the few million bucks.
http://brandonbloom.name
Robert, if you can see this,
Write a book about your experiences there, and sell the movie rights. Don't leave out the part about the chair throwing and Lukovsky's testimony.
Your true story would make Anti-Trust look like a remake of a 70's disco film.
They must have had him sign a powerful NDA, but I'm sure Robert can find a way around that.
scoble sucks...
he does. There's an old saying in 12 step rooms, "Saints don't marry sinners" which means if the guy's a mean bastard and evil then, the gal's got some major issues, too. Is this analogy true of Ray? I don't think so. But I think he is now amidst the chaos, dysfunction and politics with the drawbridge up wondering, "what the hell did I get myself into?" My advise: Kick some ass or...leave. You've got their attention, they hold you in awe, kick some ass! Now!
From Mini's blog:
"The 2.0 road isn't going to happen overnight - more like six months if it's going to hit the ground running like the first time I started this up. Another consideration, as I stand at these crossroads and hope that Mr. Willie Brown's deal maker doesn't show up, is that great changes are indeed afoot at Microsoft. And these changes are going to take time to grow and I'm not going to poke them with a sharp stick until they've had their chance to prove themselves."
I think Mini summed up his position very well and made a great point. Rather than frothing at the mouth and continuing to kick a dead horse(Slashdotters know all about this one), he's going to sit back and watch these new changes take hold and see how it goes rather than risk putting the new system in jeopardy before it has had a chance to mature and grow.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
No one knows how many bloggers work at Microsoft. It's clearly a lot more than 3,000 which is just the number of blogs at the msdn and technet blog sites. There arsofties blogging at MSN Spaces, Blogger and a host of other hosting sites as well as personally own hosting computers. And of course anyone who reads much knows that a lot of bloggers besides Robert are critical of the company at time in their blogs. But facts like that don't fit the /. mentality.
Blogging has made and continues to make a lot of changes at Microsoft. BTW can you name another company with as many bloggers? I doubt it.
"he who has the gold makes the rules." as the coming end of network neutrality and with it any real access to non-corporate content (non-corp websites being allocated something like 1K per minute, etc.) will demonstrate. was a nice net while it lasted.
an anonymous mini-PodTech blog launches?
As a Microsoft employee, I can asure you this isn't really big news. Robert is a great guy. He's always blogged the truth about products and the fact that he's leaving won't change that. Since he's always hosted his blog on his own site, his RSS address isn't changing either. About the only thing that is changing is Robert's employer record. I'm sure he'll still be kept up to date with the latest and greatest things going on at Microsoft. His influence on technology will be the same.
The fact is we do still have several thousand bloggers out there and a great number of them do say it how they see it. Most of the people who love to hate Microsoft don't see it that way, but we'll always have sceptics and we'll always have competition.
I see both of those as good things and I look forward to seeing how things progress without or lead blogger at the helm anymore.
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
I went over to this blog to read about what must've been biting social commentary on the nature or a profession and how it fundamentally changes our outlook. Instead, there was two paragraphs on how their baby is cute, and how they're not great gardners. And is this considered interesting?
I was kinda up in arms after congress voted to let the telcos charge us extra to look at this stuff, but after looking at that blog, I think they made the right choice. The net shouldn't be neutral.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...it's a good idea to work somewhere other than Microsoft!
I read this site fairly regularly, as well as this one. I'm not really sure why I do...the entertainment factor mostly.
The thing that I often find truly painful when reading such sites however are the moronic adult children who somehow think they're going to change the world purely by submitting a story to a blog, so that their fellow adolescents can then bitch, whine, and post self-congratulatory leftist screeds in response. Another thing these same imbeciles do is insist on continuing in the delusion that the American system of government is still functional.
I'd be willing to bet good money that the "blogosphere" (even that word contains an overestimation of importance) by itself has done exactly jack shit when it has come to changing the actions of any government or corporation anywhere. How exactly is it *meant* to change anything by simply (completely on its' own) expressing your opinion?
I'm now going to probably cause people to label me a hypocrite here when I admit that I have a blog, which yes, I even update once every four months or so. The difference however is that I have no illusions whatsoever about it; I realise that my blog is completely devoid of any genuine relevance or importance...and so is everyone else's.
IE7 will still be a 'tag soup' parser, and way behind in standards implementation.
You should lighten up, it's just a blog. It's not like pictures of her little girl, dogs, flowers and friends are hurting anyone.
Anyways I guess the GP forgot to actually link to the story in case, she mentions it in the about section but doesn't link to the actual blog posts.
Anyways a quick Google turned up the post we're all looking for so here are the links from the archive (in chronological order):
Perfect is the enemy of done.
We have free towels in our locker room!
A shiny new MacBook Pro.
...He Didn't... ...Go... ...to Google!...
(gasp!)
Gretchen's Goodbye.
She was a technical recruiter at Microsoft, and had some very interesting posts. In her goodbye she said: Microsoft is an awesome place to work, things are looking great, etc. oh by the way I've decided to leave and do my own thing. C'ya later!
JobsBlog doesn't have the profile of Scoble or Mini, but I think that says a lot.
For all those that think that the microsoft blogs are noticably pro-microsoft, there are a lot of "normal" people that are blogging on Vista as well now that the beta 2 has been released... Like this guy, http://vistabetablogger.blogspot.com/
Some people seem are having good reactions to the intial beta 2 release.
SG
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
Either move or ride the bus.