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?
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.
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 ?
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...
There's no dilemma for people who aren't idiots. You're supposed to pick your battles carefully, and if you have something bad to say you don't do it somewhere that has your name plastered all over it. You can have your own opinions about anything, but work is no different then anywhere else; you better be able to face the consequences of your actions.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
DRM
At this point Vista is basically an operating systems built around one feature that nobody actually wants. Even the most hard core Windows proponants in my industry are trashing it for being feature stripped, delayed, and rewritten every couple of months. It is truely a monument to how mixed (and conflicting) goals, too many managers, and marketing driven leadership can just destroy a once promising product. I'm not so much a hater or lover of Windows, but it is always sad to see so much time, effort, and money basically go wasted.
Finkployd
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.
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.
Usually a good lesson, but in this case -- Mini-Microsoft's obsession wasn't towels, it was the stack ranking system, which has just been changed, almost certainly due to his/her high-profile complaining. I'd call that a pretty big success, to change a core HR policy in a company of that size.
I never found Scoble interesting, but his major goal seemed to be to become An Important Blogger. Which he now is (by blogostandards of "important"). So the lesson is Blog, And Get Everything You Blogowant!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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
I know that you are also trolling, but whatever, I'll bite.
Microsoft has 70,000 employees world wide. About 60,000 of them are based in Redmond, WA and live in the Puget Sound area (i.e. Seattle). Some people like to work 9 to 5, so they rather a 15 to 60 minute bike ride to avoid rush hour traffic. Not to mention they then have to sit in front of a computer for the rest of their lives; better get your exercise in wherever you can.
There are also employee intramural leagues. Many people may play a game of soccer after a day of work (there are on campus fields), take a shower, and then DRIVE home.
http://brandonbloom.name
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 -
A computer game is not just art. It's also platform for social interaction and a host for modifications. I think it's exactly the sort of thing that can benefit from a direct line of communication between customers and developers. Remember ID and all their .plan files? People paid close attention to them and developers probably received helpful feedback from the community about what development choices they were making. Besides, we're not just talking about games. We're talking about all kinds of products and services. Not just technology ones and not just internet-based ones. Some products and services are less interesting than others and thus will not have a tremendous need for such interaction, but I believe many can benefit.
(Imogen Heap, rock!)
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
There should be annual awards at slashdot (the Dotties?), and this should be nominated for worst summary of the year. Gee, 2 popular but utterly unrelated MS bloggers stop blogging at MS, how can I combine that news with a "corporate evil overlord" kind of thing? Hmm, I know! I'll just make stuff up to troll with and ignore the actual news!
/. for fighting corporate bureacracy with simple tech) and decides to take time off to think about it. This is a good day for geeks. Don't hate them just because they're beautiful, man.
Scoble's turned blogging into a decent career and wants to join a startup to do it more. MiniMsft got most of what he wanted to happen (should be a hero at
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.