Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Microsoft Dossier on Journalist
Ludvig A. Norin writes "Wired journalist Fred Vogelstein blogs about how he accidentally got hold of a dossier on himself produced by Microsoft's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom. While it's not unusual for PR people to create background files on journalists, it's notable that this one leaked, and got commented by Waggener Edstrom's Frank Shaw and Wired Magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson. Makes for an interesting read — there's lots to learn from the inner workings of the Microsoft PR machinery." Someone please send me mine? I bet it's really friendly!
It'd be silly if the PR people would ignore Slashdot. They don't. Lots of folks at Microsoft read Slashdot. I frequently see Slashdot on people's notebooks when they are 5 minutes early for a meeting. We're geeks, too. Especially us in the product teams. If /. thinks we suck we want to know why so that we can keep fixing the parts that suck. We're doing a lot better here than we did 5 years ago. Heck, there are even threads where the firm clearly comes out on top in the /. opinion these days, even though lots of the contributions start with "I hate Microsoft like the next guy, but ...". That's perfectly cool. I think that being skeptical about a big corporation as a whole is not a bad thing; as it happens, we're doing lots of good stuff in the details and that's increasingly being recognized.
5 years ago "Windows BSOD buwahhahaha" was common and rated funny (or even insightful); nowadays the average Slashdot "Windoze" user (the majority, mind you) knows that that's just not happening anymore unless they catch a sucky driver; and the replies on the occasional "BSOD" post reflect that.
Security? Again, lots of sentiment that reflects our sins from the past, but the reality is that we're not only "pretty serious" about security but are also leading in many areas. Do we still have malware issues on the client? Yes; but it's dramatically improving. XPSP2, IE7, and Vista were a big steps. We're taking hits because some old software doesn't run at all or the experience is littered with UAC prompts. We've never done that. We've never ranked anything above backwards compatibility. Vista does. Vista ranks security higher. We're getting flak for it. Ok. Does that make the experience nice across the board? Allow/Cancel? No. Does is go back to normal once apps are written to comply with the new rules? Yes. Sorry, we had to break stuff to force apps (even our own) into compliance with security principles. It'll take a while until that all levels out. It will.
Does our security track record still suck on the server-side? No. (You can come out and cite security fix volumes for SQL Server, IIS, Sharepoint Server, BizTalk, ISA or the Windows Server core; that's fine)
As far as tracking individual users goes: That would be as silly as not reading Slashdot. What would anyone do with that data? What would YOU do with that data? I can't think of anything useful to do a detailed tracking of foobar876's posts. Besides, if I were interested in that ... Slashdot keeps that log for me. Talk to CmdrTaco :)
What surprises me about this PR analysis is that none of it -- not one word -- is dedicated to selling the journalist on the quality of Microsoft's products. Not their web products, not their development environments, nothing. At a minimum, they could have said something like "Channel 9 will help us show developers how we make the best development products."
If you're going to make a video blog for developers, I'd think you would focus on the quality of your development products.
Instead, it's all a bunch of internal politicking about transparency and alleviating fear. Is that how Microsoft makes money these days? Selling transparency? Alleviating fear?
I think I've got some synergy and some new paradigms for sale too, guaranteed to be content-free.