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Scoble Bites The Hand That Fed Him
An anonymous reader writes "The Times Online points out a post that Robert Scoble, former Microsoft blogger, put up on his site recently. In essence, Scoble has moved 180 degrees from his former blogging tone, saying that 'Microsoft Sucks'. More specifically, he is highly critical of Microsoft's online policy. In Scoble's words: 'Microsoft's Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks (look at that last post again). If that's in it to win then I don't get it. ... Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the Internet? Come on. This isn't winning. Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative (where's the video RSS reader? Blog search? Something like Yahoo's Pipes? A real blog service? A way to look up people?) That's how you win.'"
...former MS blogger... How obviuos must it be?
Frankly, I think the average consumer is intimidated by a perceived need for serious technical know-how to be able use just about anything other than MS (with the exception of Mac). Others probably aren't even aware of anything other than Microsoft and Mac.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it's DRM free.
I know this is absolutely begging to be modded Troll, but let's get real for a minute.
The web's been around a few years now. While they were late in recognising it, Microsoft have been taking the Internet seriously since before Google left Stanford University.
IMO, if Microsoft were able to develop "better search than Google.... better hosting than Amazon..." - they'd have done so long ago. As it stands, they can't even implement searching in their own OS (certainly not in XP - even with the Search addon, it's trivially easy to dig out something which returns zero results when it patently shouldn't) - and they've got far more control over that than Google has over the Internet.
Fact is, Microsoft's business plan has never been "build a better OS/office suite/mousetrap". It's been "build one that's good enough and market it as being better". But such marketing doesn't work so well in the Internet age because it's much easier to find out how much truth there is behind it, and AFAICT Microsoft still haven't worked that one out.
Dunno about trap, or it's just that MS no longer pays him to do PR.
It's funny how a lot of people previously were taking it as the truth, _whole_ truth, and nothing but the truth, just because he's such a hip blogger. I even remember getting modded down and getting some annoyed responses before, when I pointed out that it was his paid job to show the good parts only. "Noo, it must be all spontaneous and 100% the complete uncensored, unbiased picture, because he says so! He's so hip and irreverent that he even bravely told Ballmer to write a memo that's good for PR! He said that MS lets him write whatever he wants, good or bad, so if he doesn't show anything bad, surely nothing bad exists at MS." Not an exact quote, because I'm too lazy to search for the thread right now, but that was the general gist of it.
Now it turns out that when his paycheck no longer depends on MS, he suddenly discovers some bad things about MS too. Who would have imagined that?
So let me just say again, to everoyne: Look folks, do exercise some healthy skepticism when a conflict of interest is _that_ blatant. When people's paychecks depend on the King (or CEO, or whatever) liking what they write, there's rarely even a need to put an explicit "thou shalt present me as the Messiah" clause in their contract. Either they figure it out on their own (like this guy seems to), or natural selection takes care of it.
You can see that from ancient times to the present day. From the Pharaoh's scribes in the Old Kingdom to Pravda (or Faux News) journalists in the 20'th century to paid corporate PR/astroturfing/whatever, the same theme is there: the Pharaoh/Emperor/King/Beloved President/CEO/whatever is nothing short of perfect, and the enemy/competition/etc are a bunch of vampires or sloped-forehead orcs. And that those who didn't figure out that that's what's expected from them, found themselves "restructured" out. (Though, depending on the time and place, that could mean more fun HR personnel management methods, like beaheading, feeding someone to the crocodiles, or putting them at the top of a sharp stake. How's that for upwards mobility in the organization?;)
And that when you're interviewed by the CEO's/president's/etc personal pet PR guy, you put on your best smiling face and proclaim yourself happier than a dog in a cat show. When the guys from Pravda came to Ivan Ivanovich's door, what do you think Ivan said? "Oh, I'm so unhappy under the communist party's rule"? Heh. Most of those interviews weren't scripted either, just everyone knew that it's not like it would even make it to print if they don't say what's expected of them. So what makes anyone think that when Ballmer's personal blogger entered someone's office anything fundamentally different happened?
Briefly, take your infos from less biased sources.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, I remember everything at one time was going to be branded .NET. Didn't MSN Messenger become .NET Messenger for a while and now is Windows Live Messenger (but most people still call it MSN). Eventually if Windows Live is a failure you can see that name quietly disappear too.
Microsoft seem king of the pick a lame name and promote it strategy. I think they'd have been better sticking with the established MSN and improving it beyond recognition.
Release better products? Compete on product quality? That's not the Microsoft way...
Do you really think they will spend all that money and effort to produce better products than google/yahoo/etc ?
No, they will leverage their desktop monopoly to push their search. Their search engine may be crap, just like IE is crap, but when 95% of desktop computers sold comes with their search engine as the default, very few people will ever bother looking for anything better.
Aside from that, how will they find something better when the search engine they use is designed to lock customers in?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"If you have a technical issue with Microsoft, it's faster to search their database with Google rather than their own search engine" Times Online. Get your act together guys!
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Just because his paycheck is no longer coming from M$ he didn't become significantly more reliable. Who knows, he might get paid from elsewhere. Or just writes the crap out of spite. Once compromised, ever compromised.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Look folks, do exercise some healthy skepticism when a conflict of interest is _that_ blatant. When people's paychecks depend on the King (or CEO, or whatever) liking what they write, there's rarely even a need to put an explicit "thou shalt present me as the Messiah" clause in their contract. Either they figure it out on their own (like this guy seems to), or natural selection takes care of it. In Soviet Russia, Putin takes care of you!
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
While some marketing departments may believe that the only good publicity is good publicity, I don't think that's the case. Microsoft's biggest risk is becoming irrelevant, and even being criticized is better than being ignored. Besides, if the criticism is something fairly obvious, it's not like it's going to be news to people who have actually tried the product.
Microsoft didn't make all that money by innovating or being better than their competitors. They made that money by doing a better job of selling their products to their customers.
They still do.
John Kennedy once said:
Microsoft is in crisis, but they are not willing to acknowledge it. It seems to me that they would rather spin everything so that no one notices it. The last time they had a crisis (being late to the Internet and world wide web) they responded admirably.
But that was a different world. These days their monopolistic practices have been exposed. Competitors are not afraid of them. Microsoft is defending too many fronts, many of which they created (Xbox, Windows CE/Mobile, etc.)
More importantly, Microsoft isn't as lean and hungry as they used to be. They are living off the the wealth of Office and Windows income. However in other areas, they have not produced. Windows and Office are their crutches but if those products start to fail, MS has nothing to fall back upon anymore. As with the release of Vista, it is apparent that they have lost focus of their core products. With Office, Microsoft's problem is that older versions of Office are good enough.
A decade ago, Apple faced a similar situation. Except Apple didn't have reserves MS has today. That forced them to get lean. Whole product lines were cut while the company refocused. They scraped their old OS and developed a new one. Some credit Jobs with getting the company's comeback as he was the driving force behind it. Right now, there is no one at MS that seems is doing that. If the recent relevations from Allchin are true, his managers (Ballmer, Gates) are not focused.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
> Go back to making great mice, keyboards and joysticks.
That's like saying Lucas should direct more movies like The Empire Strikes Back.
(go look it up on IMDB)
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.