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.'"

Comments

It's a trap!

[pinky99]

...former MS blogger... How obviuos must it be?

I don't think they can

[jimicus]

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.

Re:I don't think they can

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft have been taking the Internet seriously since before Google left Stanford University.

Have they? I havn't seen much fabled "innovation" coming from Microsoft on the internet. They only take it seriously where it could threaten their traditional revenue streams, not because they have any interesting or innovative ideas that could make the internet a better place. The internet threatened to be an open network that anyone could play on, Microsoft tried to get people to use MSN instead. Netscape threatened to make the web, a killer application, platform-neutral: Microsoft made sure they killed it with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Standard compliant email servers threatened to make email platform neutral; Microsoft push Exchange and Outlook with gratuitous incompatibilities and a lack of open standards. When Google were just a search engine Microsoft let them be; when Google started to become an on-line application provider, Microsoft suddenly begin to roll out technology to counter the threat to their Office and Windows revenue. Let's not forget the whole early ".NET will revolutionise the entire internet once we work out what it is!" marketing circus that amounted to nothing.

Microsoft talk big, deliver little and focus all their energy on crushing any threat to their income streams.

Re:I don't think they can

[clickclickdrone]

Have they? I havn't seen much fabled "innovation" coming from Microsoft on the internet

Oh, I don't know. They really did turn on a dime and go all out Internet around the time of Win95. In a space of 6 months they went from no Internet to Internet enabling just about every product they had. Taking it seriously wasn't their problem.

What was their problem was 'getting it'. They added 'Internet' but didn't understand what or why so most of it was of no real use to anyone. The fact that they seriously thought they could puish MSN as a better and quite seperate Internet shows how wide of reality they were. I remember trying it out when it first went live - tons of unique content, online magazines, software etc but all quite seperate to the rest of the world. Sort of AOL without access to the Internet. Quite crazy.

Dunno about trap

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Its too late

[ixnaay]

Its nice to see that the 'hooked on phonics' kids are growing up and posting on slashdot

Re:No one can describe it

[WaZiX]

Yeah, they should set for one name and develop that, I guess they wanted to tie their web apps more to their desktop apps to give a sense of familiarity... But the worse part is even when they try to completely change their services, they still can't do it right.

Just look at their email. I have windows vista on another partition (for specialized programs that don't run on linux), well, it comes with Windows Mail. They changed their MSN/Hotmail service and you can download your mails on your desktop, great! So it's simple right, just use their new mail product to connect to the hotmail server... well NO! See their new Mail program is not 'Live' branded, so you need to download another Windows Mail, namely Windows Live Mail Desktop to use your hotmail on your desktop. And that new program logs in _before_ you can see your programs. How many mail apps do I need? And why do I have to sign in on MSN to read my other mail accounts?

And once you have installed Windows Live Mail Desktop, well it sets itself as the default program for reading your mails through windows live messenger. Worse part, it doesn't even work well with windows live messenger, since you usually have to delete mails in order for the number of mail notifications to be updated correctly!

All this money invested in locking customers into their live branded parts, such a waste! Instead of pouring money in 2 different programs, pour twice as much money in 1 and just set hotmail to work with pop/imap. Right now Microsoft has 3 completely independent email clients, 3! And none have actually been developed together, how stupid is this?

Re:Who does microsoft execs listen to?

[Technician]

When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?

I have heard some read Slashdot. If they do, I can toss out a suggestion.. Don't sell the boxed version at an order of magnitude more than the OEM version. My older hardware has been getting upgrades to Linux because the upgrade cycle does not make sense for the software. A $650 PC should not need a Multi-Hundred dollar copy of XP Pro and $400 copy of Office.

After being given a Power Point presentation to show for a guest speaker, the Office 2000 on the Windows 2000 laptop presented the text a page at a time instead of a bullet at a time. Instead of spending lots of money for a software upgrade, I tried the same presentation on the same laptop running Ubuntu with Open Office. It worked like a charm. If MS Office was a $40 upgrade, I may have considered it. Due to the many versions, Professional, Small Office, Standard, & Home and Student, I figured a full upgrade was too expensive when an alternative works fine.

Wake up and smell the coffee. You have new neighbors and they are setting up shop in your back yard. Monopoly pricing and high priced retail versions are on their way to a dead end.

Just for the record, 3 of my older PC's now have Ubuntu. I only get a new version of a MS OS on new hardware. There is no reason to spend big bucks on a software upgrade.