Scoble – “losing it” because a colleague called him up and Scoble found out he didn’t have an RSS feed. Personally, I’d prefer it if Scoble lost it whenever M$ release another rubbish piece of software, or preannounce stuff about Longhorn 2 or 3 years early that turns out to be completely incorrect, or play the FUD card against Linux, etc etc.
Michael Gartenberg channels my thoughts:
The answer to all life's issues and marketing problems isn't RSS. Blogging is a good thing but it isn't the only thing and it's starting to feel like the late 90's when everyone was scrambling to get a website together and get online. Not everyone should be blogging and not every blog should be syndicated. I repeat, the answer to every question is not a weblog and an RSS feed.
Scoble isn’t alone in succumbing to bloglomania – in fact Scoble really really really is one of the good guys – I have immense respect for what he’s doing…most of the time. But increasingly I detect a hard strident tone in the blogosphere…”got to get a blog, a blog is what you need, we can help you blog, get a blog and jump on the cluetrain/hughtrain and conquer the world, if you don’t get a blog very very bad things will happen to you…”
But blogs, and blogging [especially within an organisation] are a manifestation or a symptom – a result – of the culture and attitude within a company, not the cause.
Compare and contrast Microsoft and Sun with GM. The first two companies obviously devolve a lot of decision making down to the “trenches”, which is why you see a lot of people who actually do stuff [as opposed to being executives] blogging at the first 2 companies. GM on the other hand, strikes me as a fairly old school centralised command and control org, which is why it’s down to the Vice Chairman to effectively start their blogging mission. And just because GM now have a blog [and sing glory to the blogosphere when that happened, we’ve been vindicated] doesn’t suddenly mean that they’ve become an open and transparent company wanting to have a clueful conversation with their customers – a very senior guy spotted a channel and is taking advantage of it – how is that changing the world ?
Whilst being a fully paid up member of “this stuff is important and useful and will allow new forms of connection and communication” club, I fear the dot.blog overhype may in the end damage rather than advance the cause.
What makes you say that the company with the the most widely used OS and product suite in the world makes rubbish software. I bet its just fashionable to say so these days. Aint it?
Hey Vishu. Did you actually read the whole post, or did you just key off that one line and decide to take it out of context ? I use a lot of product, and I have no particular axe to grind against M$, but I'm not particularly an admirer.
Currently, watching my Windows XP machine slowly grind and thrash its way to death, knowing that the only solution is a complete reinstall of the OS, I can safely and with full confidence say that M$ has released in the past and will continue to release some crap. Not all of it, maybe not most of it, but certainly some of it.
Anyway - good luck on the IE7 team, and here's hoping you guys come up with something genuinely useful and innovative, and not just a firefox catchup !
Well, the rest of the post was about importance of blogging for a marketing site...totally unrelated IMHO. As far as catching up with Firefox is concerned, IE7 is going to be great. BTW, did you install the latest FF security updates? Those bugs might be the cause of your slowing WinXP machine.
Yup latest FF security updates installed - very much doubt that they're responsible for XP slowing down - I'm a bit surprised that you'd say something like that.
Anyway, as you said, most of the post is about blogging, so I'm going to wish you good luck with IE7 again and hope that you carry your passion for Microsoft into creating a great product that makes us want to use IE again !