Wired Magazine writes an indepth article on Sony’s PS3 and its fight against Xbox 360. I guarantee you that folks over at Microsoft are happy that Sony has tripped over their feet a few times. I remember meeting with Xbox folks a few years ago when Xbox 360 was only a dream on their whiteboards and they were expecting Sony to come out at the same time. They were hoping to beat them by only a few days. I don’t think they, in their wildest dreams, thought that they’d have a whole year headstart this time around.

I remember one guy explaining why the console manufacturers needed to have their console in the marketplace for four years before they’d start making profits. Microsoft learned its lesson by getting only three years last time (they came into the market a year after PS2 and always have been behind and lost massive amounts of money).

We still have two more years before we’ll really know if “being first” is the only strategy that matters in the game market. But the Wired article sure doesn’t make Sony look good at this point in time.

James Robertson chimes in too with a “PS3 is too expensive” post. I guess it depends how many people will buy $4,000 TVs over the next year. If you get one of those you’ll probably open a credit account. Then $600 more isn’t really that big a deal since that’ll probably cost you another $20 a month. At least that’s how I bought my Xbox and my HD-DVD. Best Buy gave me $10,000 worth of credit by filling out a simple form. Oh, yeah, sorry to pop everyone’s bubble that I’m one rich dude. It’s the American way: go into debt for your toys.

If the big company announces something why don’t you take advantage of it and point out what you do better than the big company? That’s what Intermedia.net just did by posting “New Google service offers 24/0 support for business users.” I linked to it because it shows why I am advocating for Podtech to switch to hosted Exchange instead of sticking with Google’s suite of services.

On the other hand, check out how Steve Gillmor enters the conversation with “Beam me up, Sergey” where he posits “can we start watching more carefully who insists the Google Office strategy doesn’t exist?”

Back at ya!

Oh, aside, how did a Microsoft employee (Dare) take over top billing on TechMeme a few minutes ago on a story about Google? Damn him for taking over the conversation! Heheh.

Yeah, I can hear the PR folks in Mountain View, CA, popping the corks on their wine bottles saying “who cares, we got the New York Times!” while forgetting all the influencers that brought Google to this party in the first place.

Too much Google talk today. Whew, I think I just went overboard there.

I just found Daniel McVicar’s video blog. This guy is funny. Not quite as funny as Ze Frank, but funny in his own way. Subscribed!

He is a former soap opera star who comments wryly on blogs and other things. Plus he interviewed Craig Newmark lately (founder of Craig’s List).

Oh, what’s this? Flickr is announcing new geotagging? Damn, didn’t they get the memo? Don’t announce anything when Google declares war on Microsoft. No one except us little bloggers will pay attention and you won’t have a hope of getting to the top of TechMeme.

Thomas Hawk, who is one of my favorite photobloggers, has more on the Flickr announcement.

I was just looking at all the blog writing about Google’s new announcement. Hey, what an awesome PR machine Google has. They don’t talk to a single blogger and we all talk about them anyway. I think bloggers like the abuse!

Anyway, Dare Obasanjo, who works for Microsoft just wrote his reactions and in the middle of all that wrote this line: “As usual, the technology blogs are full of the Microsoft vs. Google double standard.”

Absolutely 100% true. Bloggers will hype up Google stuff over Microsoft’s stuff almost everytime. Why?

A few reasons:

1) Google isn’t yet on top of the mountain. They don’t own a monopoly. They are getting close, yes, but they certainly don’t have the market share even there that Microsoft has on the desktop.
2) Google’s offerings are focused 100% on the Web. Microsoft is only about 5% on the Web. Lest we forget the biggest parts of Microsoft are Windows, Office, and Xbox. We cheer companies that pour themselves into supporting what we like. Bloggers are VERY Web-centric.
3) Office Live didn’t have a position of strength to get us excited by. Google has Gmail. Nearly every blogger I know uses Gmail. When I asked a room of Pepperdine MBA students every hand went up when I said Gmail. Yeah, a few had Hotmail, but they said they liked Gmail better. So, until Microsoft completes its rollout of the new Hotmail, er Windows Live Mail (which is very nice) then Google will continue getting the hype for its office suite.
4) Google gives us a LOT of cool free stuff. That turns into hype later on. We cheer a company on that gives us free stuff without putting a bunch of ads in our face. Microsoft still hasn’t quite figured this one out yet.
5) Expectations. When you say “Microsoft Office” to us we have a certain image of what that means in our heads. But say “Google Office” and most of us aren’t sure what that really means. That means that Google, while it explains its story, will get more attention as we all flail around and try to figure out whether it’s better or worse than what we already know, which is Microsoft’s stuff. And, Microsoft’s “Office Live” fell flat because it didn’t match our expectations of what Microsoft should do in this space.
6) Branding. Microsoft doesn’t have a cool Web brand right now. In fact, the one that they had, MSN, is being thrown in the trash and they are switching over to Windows Live. That probably will turn out to be the right decision in the long term, but in the short term Google has the better naming team — by far. Calling Google Maps “Google Maps?” Sheer brilliance! Who came up with the name “Windows Live Local?” Blllleeeeccchhh.

Anyway, we don’t cut the guy on top any slack. That’s gonna be a problem for Microsoft to get its stuff noticed. On the other hand Microsoft can get our attention the old fashioned way: it can spend its $60 billion in cash. There are plenty of bloggers out there who’ll write about you if you send some cash into the system.

Remember on Friday when I was talking about big-company PR? Yeah, Google went to the New York Times to leak tomorrow’s announcement of new business-focused services. Information Week got a good look too. It’s already at the top of TechMeme.

Hey, lookie here, 107 news stories about the exact same thing. On a Sunday night, even! I had no idea so many journalists were even working on a Sunday. (Hint: they aren’t, this was written Friday and held).

OK, most of that is big-company news sources. See how this works? One, or a few reporters get an exclusive, then everyone has to jump in too.

So, I figure since it’s Google that the blogs would be all over this one. Over to Google blogsearch I go (I like Technorati better, but this is a story about Google so you’d figure that they’d get at least a few bloggers to talk about it, right?)

I can’t find a single blogger who got leaked this information along with the big-city newspapers.

Surely they’ve given Mike Arrington or Om Malik an early look, right?

Nope and nope.

UPDATE: Om says he was invited to be on the beta, but turned it down because he didn’t like the privacy disclosure.

How about John Battelle, search engine expert who wrote a book on Google. Surely he has the inside track, right?

Nope. He had to learn about it from a spammy mail sent to customers.

How about Danny Sullivan, most important influential in the search industry? (According to Google’s founders). Nope.

Dan Farber? He writes for ZDNet (professional press, surely he got in on the news) and covers Silicon Valley like a glove. Nope, he’s reduced to linking to Information Week.

Damn, did we all piss off Google PR or something or are they trying to hide something?

Well, hope that PR strategy works for Google. In the experiences of other companies that have gotten lucky enough to get all that PR it really doesn’t work out all that well unless the influentials also back up the hype.

The funny thing is that at PodTech we’re actually using most of the “Google Office Suite.”

I hate it. It isn’t even in the same ballpark yet as having an Exchange server.

Maybe that’s why Google didn’t want to show it to influentials first. They’d tell the big-city press crew to take a pass on this until it at least gets close to Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.

And, yes, I am meeting with Google this week to show them just how far off the mark their offerings are in the Enterprise space.

Please note: that doesn’t mean Microsoft should sit back and celebrate. They are gonna get their ass kicked in this space because of their lack of attention to the Macintosh. That’s the #1 reason I’ll probably be using Google’s stuff over the next year instead of Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Entourage.

But more on that another day. For today Microsoft is safe from the Google onslaught.

When Google starts showing normal everyday bloggers (not even self-important jerks like me, but the “z list” that no one usually cares about) their stuff, then Microsoft should worry big time.

Check out this picture or this one with Patrick that I just took in the San Francisco Apple store. They sure market blogging and podcasting big time. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t understand that consumers aren’t consumers anymore. They are producers too! Media producers. Apple gets this, at least at a marketing level (they don’t at a spiritual level, which is why they don’t encourage normal everyday Apple employees to blog and podcast). It creates a marketing disconnect. Do they really believe in what their marketing says they do?

Those are the most prominent signs, right at the front door, in the SF store (which is TOTALLY PACKED!)

Ian Kallen writes about webspam in the Google ecosystem. This is one area that Windows Live Spaces got right. Until Microsoft has an effective spam blocking system it’ll stick with requiring commenters to register.

On the other hand, why doesn’t Google get more aggressive about blocking spammers? Because to do so would require either shelling out some serious cash to acquire Akismet or another spam blocking system or it would require making things a LOT tougher for its users. Translation: that would retard adoption, something that an advertising-distribution network like what Google really is will have a VERY hard time doing.

I need to go back to my little blog counting experiment that flamed out last weekend. When I was looking through the various blog systems I found that while most Live Spaces have no content, Google’s Blogger has a ton of spammers. Not sure which one is better, to tell the truth.

Thanks to Doc Searls for linking me here.

UPDATE: Matt Cutts, of Google, points out this article is old (April, 2006) and that Blogger has a new system that’s a lot better at cutting down spam. Might be true, but I saw a ton that still was getting through the system last week.

It’s interesting. I’m hearing about more and more stuff (like I just linked to) from Microsoft blogs before hearing about them from big-name journalists (like Steven Levy at Newsweek, or Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal).

It used to be that the only way to announce news was to talk with those two guys (and maybe a dozen or so others).

A lot of what these people do is keep relationships going with these journalists, hoping that they’ll write something nice when their product comes out. But the big companies still hold the big news for these guys. Why? Cause they still have immense influence due to the audiences that read their writings.

The hard part is when they want to give a jouralist an exclusive. Exclusives are important ways to reward journalists for writing a great review last time (which encourages them to write more good reviews, right?) but it also is just a way to reward someone for building an influential and large audience. If you were in corporate PR would you talk with, say, a geek with a few thousand readers like Scott Hanselman, or Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy first?

The thing is people in the new word-of-mouth network are figuring out it really doesn’t matter WHO you talk to first, as long as you talk with a diverse range of bloggers and make yourself available. Remember how I broke my news that I left Microsoft? I talked with 15 bloggers. I think only a couple of whom were in the top 100 on Technorati. The guy who actually broke my news? I didn’t talk with him at all and, in fact, didn’t know who he was before he broke the story. Total Z list (at that point).

Which is a key point. There is an invisible information sharing network among both big-name journalists as well as bloggers. When you put a journalist under NDA they tell their friends anyway. Or, at least give a good series of winks. Even something as simple as “I can’t tell you anything, but you should watch Google over the next few weeks.”

I call this “turning up the PR heat.” Everyone in the PR business knows it happens. They even have plans for what happens when news leaks. Usually they’ll have a list of other journalists to email or call if news leaks. That’s why when you see something happen it seems like everyone in the world starts talking about it all at once.

One thing about all this is to keep in mind Michael Gartenberg’s rule: those who really know don’t talk. Which is true cause they have signed an NDA.

It is something to keep in mind, most rumors turn out not to be true (or get blown out of relation because they are trying to read between the lines of a wink or a nod and don’t really have the right information). Remember the old “network” game we played when we were kids? Get 10 kids together, tell one of them something and tell him to pass it down. By the time it gets to the end of the line it sounds nothing like what the original thing was.

But it does get the line of 10 talking, doesn’t it? PR people know this intimately. They are experts at causing conversations to happen. The good ones are also expert at guiding the conversation so the right thing gets passed along.

This invisible information sharing network is real interesting. I remember the day when I learned about the “Universal Runtime” which was code name for .NET. I almost got fired for hearing about that six months before it was talked about publicly — someone who was in an Software Design Review told me “this will be a huge deal for software developers” and I used that information to email my own network about it. Someone told someone at Microsoft and I got in trouble cause, not only wasn’t I supposed to know that information at that time, but I just let a huge number of people know about it too.

Naughty, naughty.

Anyway, just cause it pisses off product managers doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen anymore.

Today my network is telling me that Google is showing around some sort of new Office-oriented suite of services. But they are holding everyone they are talking with to an NDA/embargo. My sources wouldn’t even tell me when the embargo ends.

But, this does cause some interesting distortions in the invisible news network. The pressure is building in the PR kettle. Sometime soon that pressure will release and it’ll be all over Memeorandum.

The weird thing is “does this PR actually get what companies want, which is adoption?”

Here, let’s check in again with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. He had a five star review in a USA national newspaper. On the front of the business section. With a picture even. He only got about 40 downloads from that. When he gets talked about on blogs, he gets a much higher rate of downloads (about 10 times, what he told me). He’s had quite a few newspaper reviews, by the way, and they, except for one in the New York Times, gave him small adoption increases.

Riya’s CEO, Munjal Shaw, says talking to bloggers is more important than talking to Walt Mossberg. I still don’t agree with that. Walt Mossberg or talking to the New York Times tech team is still more important, but here’s where I think Munjal is right:

If you start a PR campaign at the bottom of the stack. Yes, with Z listers, not A listers like me or Arrington or Om Malik, you’ll build a much better story.

It will only take a few hours for us to figure out something important is going on anyway and you’ll get a LOT more adoption that way. Plus, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal will have better quotes (from real users, even!) and they’ll be more likely to write about you, not less (you do have a hot product that everyone will talk about, right?)

So, who are the 40 Z listers you’re talking to today?

Hint: most big companies will never get this. They have to convince their bosses that their plans are correct. That means ALWAYS starting out with the A list and working down.

Anyway, even big-name journalists hate this game, they tell me, because it burns them more often than it helps them (and it puts pressure on them to only write nice things about the big companies, which they hate).

And the PR cycle continues. What you hearing from YOUR network? How are perceptions changing? That’ll tell you who has the better PR teams and methodology.

For myself? I used to believe in the “hand it to a big name first” methodology. I don’t anymore. When I have something to announce I’ll do it on my blog first, or I’ll show up at a conference where there’s lots of bloggers and show it to them equally there, with a blog to follow at first leak.

If you’re an entrepreneur, how do you announce your new products to the world?

Have you recently shipped a new product? Tell us about it here and link to your site.

I was over reading Dare Obasanjo’s blog and saw he linked over to the new Windows Live WiFi team. That team is working on tools that sound very useful. I’m signing up for the beta.

In other Windows Live news Don Dodge links to the new image and video search. That’ll be interesting to try out.

Sounds like Windows Live is quickly coming out with lots of stuff to compete with Google. More on Google next.

One thing that’s good about corporate blogging is you can correct the record when other news sites get things wrong.

Here’s an example of this. Earlier this week a story broke across the blogs that Microsoft’s Office team was changing the way its new ribbon interface would work in the 2007 version of Office.

Turns out that wasn’t true, according to Darren Strange who is a 2007 Office Product Manager.