Tales From Behind Microsoft's Firewall

lizzyben writes "CIOinsight.com is hosting an interview with Robert Scoble on life after Microsoft. 'By blogging for the world's largest software company, Scoble changed the way companies communicate with the world and became an industry celebrity in the process.' He talks about MS culture, senior management and the benefits of blogging from inside the belly of the software beast." More from the article: "We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word 'Microsoft' on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, 'I hate Microsoft,' I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, 'What's going on?' And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens. It was an invaluable focus group that Microsoft didn't have to pay for."

Comments

Spare me, Robert

[truthsearch]

I have one of the "I hate Microsoft" web sites he linked to. I used to read Scoble's blog and comment on it occasionally before he become famous. As soon as his blog started to get any traction he stopped posting anything intelligent. He became a pure evangelist who claimed Microsoft should listen to the haters, then bashed anything critical of Microsoft. And in the end, not much if anything changed. Microsoft used him to try to improve their image. And having this fake power Scoble became full of himself. He's a tool. Microsoft still ignores critics.

Re:focus groups and corporate bs

[TheRaven64]

Version 7 of UNIX was the first one to be really nice to use. Some regard it as the pinnacle of UNIX, with everything added afterwards as bloat. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it was definitely a very nice system, particularly judged by the standards of its era.

Microsoft licensed it from AT&T and marketed their derivative (which included some BSD enhancements) as Xenix, a full-blown UNIX for 16-bit x86 computers. For a while, it had the majority of the UNIX market share. Xenix was eventually dropped by Microsoft (and sold to the old SCO) when they started developing OS/2.

At the moment, Microsoft are working on Singularity, an OS using type theory as the basis for security (based on similar ideas to the JNode operating system).

Over the last three decades, Microsoft has developed three 'real' operating systems; Xenix, OS/2, and Singularity. They have developed Windows NT, which is quite a nice OS buried under a pile of userspace crap written for backwards compatibility. The closest thing to a real OS that they have been able to sell is NT, and that's because of all the backwards compatibility junk, rather than the strength of the OS.

The moral of the story? You can build a better mousetrap, and the market will decide it's rubbish because it doesn't come in purple.