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."
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.
slashdot is not just junk news, but i can inderstand why you'de feel that way.
:) but people like fantasy and lies. fantasy is a little differen than lies because fantasy is somethign we can seperate from reality and say 'well that was just a fantasy' if you let the lines of fantasy and reality blurr then you start to run into trouble. and that's when people get in trouble. ah well.
there certainly is a lot of very very pointless news on slashdot, and this article is probabbly one of them, but still.. as far as if the truth is more important or less important that is harder to say. but to some of us the truth is important, to others they need to have their lies to make them feel all better.
ah well. the truth is out there. if you can handle it
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
No, it means they know how to count the number of accounts on their MSDN blogs site. :P
As for Mini-MSFT giving up the towel (forgive the pun), he(she?)'s not. He clearly wrote that he's simply taking a break to see how things turn out given the recent internal changes at Microsoft. He said he'd continue to post interesting links and allow people to voice their concerns in the comments discussions, which is the real heart of the site, and that he'd return to full writing sometime in the future.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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