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Upstart Bloggers at Microsoft Moving On
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jun 11, 2006 12:37 PM
from the less-talk-from-the-depths dept.
from the less-talk-from-the-depths dept.
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."
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Upstart Bloggers at Microsoft Moving On
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lesson? (Score:4, Insightful)
That the power of the blog can be used to add to the power of the boardroom?
Coming features? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 05 2006, @05:31AM)
-jcr
Re:Coming features? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://homestarrunner.com/)
At this point Vista is basically an operating systems built around one feature that nobody actually wants. Even the most hard core Windows proponants in my industry are trashing it for being feature stripped, delayed, and rewritten every couple of months. It is truely a monument to how mixed (and conflicting) goals, too many managers, and marketing driven leadership can just destroy a once promising product. I'm not so much a hater or lover of Windows, but it is always sad to see so much time, effort, and money basically go wasted.
Finkployd
Where are the images? (Score:1)
It's already happening to some extent (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
3000 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:3000 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This is nothing new (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
Obligatory Simpsons Quote (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.joystick101.org/)
What is the news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot Flash: Microsoft has put towels in the locker rooms! Full story at 11:00!
Blogs still have power (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.whyweworry.com/)
Wow, way to twist it Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?
not the point (Score:2)
(http://www.scottfeldstein.net/)
What is left to blog about at Microsoft anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why on earth is this news (Score:5, Funny)
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*
Two anecdotes must signal a trend (Score:2)
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Why would you blog about your employer? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://penopticon.com/)
Whisle-blowing is much more fun, than blogging anyhow, especially when Lauren Bacall [nndb.com] is your teacher:
Two different things... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Something's not right... (Score:1)
Any blogger that can post the daily accounts of the corporation he works for, sling mud, point fingers, risk his job and in the end, still have his job all in order to know where his towels are, is a blogger to be reckoned with...
MS isn't a perpetual muse (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 02 2002, @12:40PM)
Who Reads This Crap? (Score:1)
The summary is trolling! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://brandonbloom.name/)
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.
Think Ray Ozzie has any regrets? I'm betting... (Score:1)
Mini is doing the right thing (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday February 28 2003, @05:49PM)
From Mini's blog:
"The 2.0 road isn't going to happen overnight - more like six months if it's going to hit the ground running like the first time I started this up. Another consideration, as I stand at these crossroads and hope that Mr. Willie Brown's deal maker doesn't show up, is that great changes are indeed afoot at Microsoft. And these changes are going to take time to grow and I'm not going to poke them with a sharp stick until they've had their chance to prove themselves."
I think Mini summed up his position very well and made a great point. Rather than frothing at the mouth and continuing to kick a dead horse(Slashdotters know all about this one), he's going to sit back and watch these new changes take hold and see how it goes rather than risk putting the new system in jeopardy before it has had a chance to mature and grow.
Proof that Slashdot is a poor source for news (Score:1, Troll)
No one knows how many bloggers work at Microsoft. It's clearly a lot more than 3,000 which is just the number of blogs at the msdn and technet blog sites. There arsofties blogging at MSN Spaces, Blogger and a host of other hosting sites as well as personally own hosting computers. And of course anyone who reads much knows that a lot of bloggers besides Robert are critical of the company at time in their blogs. But facts like that don't fit the /. mentality.
Blogging has made and continues to make a lot of changes at Microsoft. BTW can you name another company with as many bloggers? I doubt it.
the relevant murphy's law here is... (Score:1, Offtopic)
how long before... (Score:1)
Not a bad thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The lesson learned... (Score:1, Troll)
Very true (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://aqpeag.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday April 21 2007, @05:39AM)
The thing that I often find truly painful when reading such sites however are the moronic adult children who somehow think they're going to change the world purely by submitting a story to a blog, so that their fellow adolescents can then bitch, whine, and post self-congratulatory leftist screeds in response. Another thing these same imbeciles do is insist on continuing in the delusion that the American system of government is still functional.
I'd be willing to bet good money that the "blogosphere" (even that word contains an overestimation of importance) by itself has done exactly jack shit when it has come to changing the actions of any government or corporation anywhere. How exactly is it *meant* to change anything by simply (completely on its' own) expressing your opinion?
I'm now going to probably cause people to label me a hypocrite here when I admit that I have a blog, which yes, I even update once every four months or so. The difference however is that I have no illusions whatsoever about it; I realise that my blog is completely devoid of any genuine relevance or importance...and so is everyone else's.
Now Scoble can get what he really wants! (Score:1)
(http://www.stevengharms.com/)
Jobs Blog (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 29 2004, @03:34PM)
Gretchen's Goodbye [msdn.com].
She was a technical recruiter at Microsoft, and had some very interesting posts. In her goodbye she said: Microsoft is an awesome place to work, things are looking great, etc. oh by the way I've decided to leave and do my own thing. C'ya later!
JobsBlog doesn't have the profile of Scoble or Mini, but I think that says a lot.
Non-microsoft Blogs (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 11 2003, @06:42PM)
Some people seem are having good reactions to the intial beta 2 release.
SG
Re:slashdot is nothing but junk news (Score:3, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 11, @10:34PM)
there certainly is a lot of very very pointless news on slashdot, and this article is probabbly one of them, but still.. as far as if the truth is more important or less important that is harder to say. but to some of us the truth is important, to others they need to have their lies to make them feel all better.
ah well. the truth is out there. if you can handle it