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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."
Yeah, plenty of them. In fact, here's a list of the features I was able to find documentation on that will be released with the seven thousand different versions of Windows Vista (depending on which one you own, of course):
...Hold on, that's not working either.
...
- Aero Glass! Well...okay, so it's not a feature so much as it is eye candy that everyone but Microsoft is offering with their OS now...let me try that again.
- WinFS! Oh, wait...they cut that out because it was slow and probably wouldn't be finished for release time.
- Requires more memory and a 256MB+ video card to run!
- IE7! Now has all of the features that Firefox has already had for several years!
- Security features now include: many irritating and badly-implemented popup boxes that require several click-throughs to make even the most mundane tasks a complete pain in the hole. Gives the appearance of working on security without actually -doing- much about it, and as a bonus, allows Microsoft to blame viral infections on people who mindlessly clicked through all the popup's hoping they'd be able to use their computer. Not that they have a voice anyway, since if Microsoft gets their way, you'll only be "renting" the operating system on a TPM-enabled machine that only they can sign binaries for.
Alright, you win. For now. In the end they'll still win, because they can force that garbage down the industry's throat at will.
You know, this is a little funny. Two bloggers at Microsoft who apparently did a good job getting attention are moving on ... to real blogging companies, who probably discovered them thanks to their work at the company we love to loathe.
Seems to me that congratulations are in order here. They got better jobs and that's, well, better. In the end, tweaking the corporate tail paid off.
Good news, no?
D
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.
How about this for a lesson: If I didn't believe in what my company was doing, if I wasn't excited about it, I wouldn't be working for them or blogging about them.
Lack of dissension among the ranks is more likely a sign of employees buying into the company's vision and being treated well by the company, than from management flying off the handle, throwing chairs around at every perceived threat. It's more likely something you'd expect from a company that's known to engage in dodgy and unethical business practices.
Wait a minute...