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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."
"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."
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
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...
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.
It got redesigned. Can't you tell? :P
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.
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."
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.
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
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 -