Jim Posner just asked me in email “any thoughts?” about Ray Ozzie’s speech recently at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting.

You might have missed it, but about halfway down the speech Ray started talking about “optimization.”

That’s code for “all your attention data are belong to us.”

OK, OK, call off the black helicopters. This is the new “fuzzy bear” Microsoft. And, anyway, they are just copying Google.

You think that Google’s datacenters are just holding search indexes?

No, now Google is holding Scoble’s corporate email too! And, those servers know which emails I delete, which ones I forward, which ones I click on. It even “optimizes” those emails by pulling out spam. How nice.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. I went through and read Ryan Stewart’s thoughts on Microsoft. That brought me to Richard MacManus’ thoughts. Which brought me to Dana Gardner’s thoughts. Hey, ZDNet has some great bloggers, doesn’t it?

But Dana brought me to Joe Wilcox’s thoughts. The experience hub.

That’s all very interesting, but I think we’re all looking in the wrong direction.

It all starts with the blog. Now, why can’t I put my blog on the map? When you go to Live.com and search on “Scoble” why can’t I customize my results there with more information for you?

When I search on “Office Furniture” why is the first thing I see stores? I don’t wanna see freaking corporate info. I wanna know what HUMANS like to use in their offices.

None of the big search companies have figured out that it’s the humans who “optimize” the Web.

They just wanna collect the big company paychecks.

I’m hearing that too here at Podtech. It’s all bunk. If there is no audience, there is no advertising. I’m not an “eyeball” to be tracked, or optimized.

I’ll be looking for who lets me get to the other humans the fastest.

Here, let’s try this. If I can spend less than $500 for an office chair, which one is best?

Optimize that!

Get me the humans and you’ll add $2 billion in value. And, yes, Ray, I believe you know how to do it. You’re still the only Microsoft executive to show up at a grass-roots event in Silicon Valley.

Remember Active Desktop and Channels? Microsoft could have OWNED the blog world and RSS. Why did that fail? Cause when we looked at it all we saw were big companies.

If you optimize for them you’ll fail.

My attention data +is+ valuable. But if you forget about the little people we’ll remember and we’ll go with systems that put us on stage. Why was Channel 9 magical? Not cause of the shaky video camera work I did. It was cause it was the first corporate site that put CUSTOMERS ON THE HOME PAGE!

I’m missing the humans when I visit Live.com. Actually the new Spaces thing got us to pay attention to Live.com again. Take heed off of that.

Give +us+ control of our “optimizations” (er, attention data) and we’ll be on your side. Behave like Microsoft of old and we’ll just stick with Google.

Ahh that’s a fun theory.

But it’s easily disproved. Jay Greene at BusinessWeek has met both of us. He’ll verify that we’re not the same.

Oh, hell, while we’re talking about Mini, a friend of mine said he had compared notes with all the journalists who’s met him and he thinks that Mini is done by a team of people. I don’t think so, though. It’s VERY hard to fake the writing style of someone else.

Whew, the comments on my Windows Vista ship date rant are coming in hot and heavy. I usually would answer them in the comment area, but I think some of the thoughts posted there need more discussion. So, let’s go.

Cody says “Windows Vista is the wrong direction for Microsoft. Instead of putting in MORE bloat, they need to seriously re-work Windows, and make it lean and mean.”

Um, sorry, I TOTALLY disagree. This is SUCH a engineer’s way to look at the world. “Take out the features,” is what he’s really saying. Sorry, I want an OS with more features. I want an OS that’ll protect me against phishing attacks. I want an OS that’ll play videos better. I want an OS that has handwriting recognition and speech recognition built in. And a lot more. You want an OS without all those things? Then load up Linux and take all the crud out and build your own OS. It’s not what the market wants or needs which is why more people use Macs than use Linux on laptops.

Anona says I said that Vista would never slip more. I never said that. I attacked a “journalist” for saying that he knew that for sure. That isn’t something that was possible to report (still isn’t) so that’s why I attacked that journalist, cause I want news to be news and opinions to be opinions. Hint, what I wrote last night was an opinion. Just to make it clear. And you know what they say about opinions, right? Everyone has one.

For the record, go back and read what I wrote when I worked at Microsoft in the last six months: I said I didn’t know when it would ship and that Microsoft should make sure it ships when it’s ready, and not feel pressure to ship sooner than that.

Cody again: “Why does an Operating System need to use so many damn resources? Why?”

Cause it does more. If you don’t like that, go back and use Windows 3.11. It ran on a machine with 4MB of RAM. (Not 4Gigs, 4 megs).

Christopher Coulter says the world won’t forget about Vista’s slip. Well, that might be true, but for Microsoft it’ll be far worse to be remembered for shipping an OS that isn’t finished than shipping one that’s a few more months late.

Asssuck says: >you suckass worm….remember when you were pimping this ?

Go back and look at the last year’s worth of my posts. I think they stand on their own. I do like Vista, still do. But I want it to be a great OS, not one where my friends are reporting tons of troubles cause they didn’t take the time to do it right.

Garth says: “Also is Vista not supposed to make our computing lives easier and simpler or are they trying to shovel everything including the kitchen sink onto our desktop to justify the pricetag ???.”

Huh? I believe Vista DOES make our computing lives easier. The desktop search features are a huge advance. The multimedia capabilities are WORLDS ahead of anything else I’ve used. And the Tablet PC, Speech Recognition, and Media Center stuff that’s in there is WORLDS ahead of Apple. Although watch Apple in a week. Hint hint.

JuanDG writes: “Shame on you scoble, I know MS is not the hand that feeds you any more, but you don’t have to turn and bite it. Shame on you. I was waiting for a reason to unsuscribe, and I guess this is it…”

You should have unsubscribed long ago. I attacked Microsoft before I worked there (told Bill Gates to split up the company). I attacked Microsoft when I worked there (on many many times). I will attack Microsoft now when it does things that I don’t like. If that’s not something you are comfortable with you shouldn’t be reading me.

Booger: “Who are you and what have you done with the real Robert Scoble?!? Or is this real Robert Scoble unmasked?”

I said pretty much the same stuff when I worked at Microsoft. Yeah, my tone was probably nicer.

Myles: “They have to have something special in Vista for the people who are satisfied with XP.”

Let’s just start with TONS BETTER SECURITY.

TomB: “MSFT had a chance to re-work the OS and put it on top of a BSD or a LINUX kernel. They chose to stay proprietary instead. The customers will continue to pay a price for that decsion.”

Sorry, throwing application compatibility out the window would be monumentally STUPID. Stop thinking like an engineer. Start thinking like a customer.

Jeff: “From what I’ve seen, much of what the consumer is going to *perceive* as being “Vista” can already be accomplished by skinning XP and maybe some add-ons.”

If that’s how they preceive Vista then they simply aren’t listening. Maybe that customer would be better off with a Macintosh anyway. Oh, and I’m gonna run Vista on my Mac if they come out with what I hear they are gonna come out with next week.

Miles: “Robert, I’m amused that you post this now. There’s no way you would have posted this as a MS employee. You would have self censored it, or at a minimum, sugar coated it somewhat.”

We’ll never know for certain, but I think at some point I would have said pretty much what I said last night. I never was one of those who cheerleaded trying to ship crap.

John: “When things are working correctly, STFU already. If I have all the drivers to make my USB device work, I don’t need to know that.”

John, have you ever worked on the customer support lines for Windows? Sorry, many users are NOT like you. I agree with you, by the way, but if I designed an OS for myself it’d have 10% marketshare. Or worse.

Jared: “I agree that Vista is not ready to ship but I put the blame on the managers at Microsoft. You have a product that is two years late and you answer “it will ship when it’s ready” at your annual finance meeting? I believe Microsoft is losing their best programmers because they can not offer better benefit packages. They can’t do this since their stock is no good because they have no product(Vista).
Balmer is a good CEO if you need a cheerleader. Microsoft needs better management.”

Jared, you must have mistaken me for Mini-Microsoft. There’s enough blame to go around. When a team doesn’t do a job on time the blame can’t just go to the ones on top. Sorry. I know of plenty of ways that employees made promises that they couldn’t keep either.

This is STILL software. Software is a human endeavor. It’s not something done by a machine. Until a programmer cranks the code out, and it compiles, gets tested, gets integrated with the rest of everyone else’s code, gets tested again, etc etc there’s really no way to know when it’ll be ready. Anyone who says they can accurately predict when software will be ready is a liar. If you expect accurate ship dates in the software industry you’ll constantly go unsatisfied.

James Clarke: “5472 is way better and pretty much usable where beta 2 was an abortion. 6 months is overkill if it keeps getting better at this rate.”

I totally agree that Vista is starting to feel good in lots of places. I’m just going off of my past experience with Windows and Macintosh betas and where they started feeling good in their ship processes. That tells me that October won’t be the date (which is what they needed to nail to get it out in January). What will the real date end up being? That’ll be very interesting to watch and see. I just want them to take the time to really nail this.

I don’t want to see blogs that, when it finally ships, says “wait for the service pack.”

E3 (the big game conference) is dead. Great analysis.

The truth is you gotta look deeper than that. Look at how you heard about when I quit Microsoft. I talked to 15 people. At a freaking blogger conference which cost almost nothing to put on. And it got, according to one PR guy I know, 50 million media impressions.

So, why does anyone need to go to a big conference to hear the news again? Simple: you don’t. It’s not worth doing.

Not when a CEO can write a blog, get more people to visit it in 36 hours than would probably visit his booth at the Detroit Auto Show.

How do you get news out? Invite a blogger over for lunch. It doesn’t matter who the blogger is. If the news is interesting it’ll spread and spread fast.

I wonder how long CES will survive?

Tom Foremski reports that IBM knew it was being disrupted by forces outside of it (aka Microsoft) and was powerless to stop them.

Someday I’ll print an email that proves that Microsoft’s top executives knew it was being disrupted in 2005 by Internet forces and was powerless to stop them. Someday. That email I’m thinking of was written before Yahoo bought Flickr and got a response that included the words “business value” repeated 13 times.

Now THAT is a gesture!

And this whole blog post is a gesture too. Can you figure out what the gesture is? Heheh.

I’m sad to agree with Robert McLaws about Windows Vista’s ship schedule. This sucker is just not ready. Too many things are too slow and/or don’t work. I’ve been on the betas of every Windows OS since Windows 3.1 and Vista is starting to feel good, but it doesn’t feel good enough to release to the factory in October. It feels like it needs a good six more months than that, which would mean a mid-year release next year.

Some things that need to be fixed? UI issues (see Chris Pirillo). Speed/performance issues (unless it’ll only be run on super-fast new computers — I went back to XP on my Lenovo Tablet PC because Vista was sluggish and the drivers weren’t reliable). Application compatibility (I’m hearing that many apps are having problems). Driver compat (my Dell computer at Microsoft never worked completely, and a coworker called me a few days ago to ask “did you ever get the soundcard working?”)

Remember: no one will remember whether this thing slipped another few months IF it’s a good product when it comes out (remember Windows 2000? It slipped by years). But everyone will remember if this is a disaster (the community is still talking about Windows ME, which was a particularly horrible release).

If this ships in October, I will recommend not installing it and waiting for the first service pack. There’s no way the quality will be high enough to trust it if it ships early. I hope Microsoft takes the time to do this right.

If they don’t Apple will have far more market share at the end of 2007 than it will if Microsoft ships a great release.

Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.

Ever had a piece of your code fail miserably on stage in front of the world? Larry Osterman at Microsoft recently did (he works on the audio team) and wrote about it.

I think it’s interesting that I met two of my favorite bloggers for the first time at BlogHer (both of whom are men, Guy Kawasaki and John Battelle).

But, that beside, what else did I learn?

Heather Champ, community manager of Flickr, did a great session on digitial photography, but she demonstrated how important it is to listen after the session is over. A group surrounded her and wanted to know more. She introduced us to filtrs, which is a very interesting concept I hadn’t considered before.

Let’s say you have a cell phone camera. And you want a black and white photo, but your cell phone camera doesn’t do that. Well, you email your photo to a different email address that takes your color photo, strips out the color, and then uploads that photo to Flickr.

The problem is only one guy (Aaron Straup Cope) I know of has some Filtrs of his own (he wrote them and runs them on his own servers for his own use). That makes Heather (and me) very jealous. You can see an example of one of his Filtrs in this photo he made of Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield.

Other things I learned from BlogHer?

That the stereotypes about women are true (they talk about things like mothering, cooking, sewing, and soft stuff like feelings, sex, relationships, along with broader things like books and movies far more often than I usually hear among the male dominated groups I usually find myself in after conferences). But, the fact that they are true gives women HUGE economic power and content power that the tech bloggers simply won’t touch.

Saturn did about as good a job of marketing to this group as I’ve seen a company do.

Seth Godin wrote that all marketers are liars. But Saturn taught me that you don’t need to lie, or even write a story. What a good marketer should do in today’s world is let people write THEIR OWN story about the product.

How did Saturn do that? They brought several prototypes, along with some cool ass convertibles. Then they said “here’s the keys” and stood back.

I watched as group after group came back with smiles on their faces and, more importantly, as tons of photos were snapped:

Not every company did it right, though. MSN Windows Live Spaces didn’t improve its position with this audience. I took careful note of what people are using here. My wife’s blog is the only one I saw that was done on MSN Spaces.

This brings me to another point. Companies that listen to audiences like this are hyper rare. They still look at audiences like this as a one-way conversation. Let’s just push our crap out to them, and get our messaging in front of them, but let’s not send any of our engineers or program managers to LISTEN.

If they were listening they would have heard just why almost no one here uses Spaces. And why Six Apart’s Vox product is doomed to fail (Mena, why did you give a product pitch when asked on stage “what do you think the future is going to look like?” That got you scorned by women at dinner afterward that I, and my wife, talked to). More on Vox soon.

My wife, even made one of Spaces’ most negative things (that you need to sign up for Passport to comment) into a positive (it keeps away most of the trolls).

But Spaces’ feature set demonstrates that they aren’t listening to this audience. Buying a sponsorship makes everyone feel good, but the story that the conference goers I talked to are writing is “that was nice, but use WordPress or TypePad cause they are better tools.”

Oh, and BlogHer attendees, they don’t listen to me either so welcome to the crowd. (I gave them a list of things that they should do, starting with “improve your HTML quality” and “get tagging” and they didn’t do any of those yet, which demonstrates a lack of listening on their behalf).

Other things I noticed: the men were quiet. For the most part. Some women complained about Marc Canter’s interruptions during one session. Christine Heron took that to mean that men weren’t heard from. Well, I came to listen, not to speak. The other men I talked to felt the same way. It was refreshing to work on listening skills again and learn something from a group of people I wouldn’t usually be with.

Why don’t I take notes anymore at conferences? Cause of people like Christine Heron. Wonderful reports. Technorati is brimming over with great reports from Blogher. Interesting how our conference attendance behavior has changed. Now the first question I hear isn’t “how do you get on wifi?” but is rather “what’s the conference tag?”

Or people like Lynne Johnson who wrote up the panel Maryam was on in exquisite detail. Amy Gahran is another great reporter that was there.

The BlogHer blog has a LOT more.

As to Vox, the idea is great (expand blogging to more “regular people”) but I’ve gotta wonder how successful it’ll be. Microsoft’s Bob taught the world that no one wants to be a beginner, or seen as one. I think it’s condescending, don’t you? If you’re going to get dragged to learn to ski, don’t you want to get off the beginning slopes and hang out with your friends on the intermediate and advanced slopes?

The world doesn’t want a ski resort that caters to beginners. Doesn’t work.

Same for blogging tools.

Mena shouldn’t have used her time on stage to appear visionary to pitch a product, especially to position it for those people who don’t have the technical chops to join Blogher.

Instead she should have laid out a real vision for blogging for 2010. How do we get half a billion people blogging? What will that look like? What will it look like when I can put my blog on top of a map? When you’ll read my blog on a portable device? How will video blogging change and/or improve? What will advertising systems look like in 2010?

Mena had an awesome opportunity to lay out that kind of future. Instead she did the thing Microsofties usually do: she pitched her product. What a disappointment.

What did you learn from BlogHer?

Well, I have to go. The women are Ponzi is calling and I’m still Maryam’s driver — we’re heading to Berkeley today with her.

Michael Martine (not a Microsoft employee) says Photosynth, a new app from Microsoft, is really cool. On10 and Channel 9 have good videos too about this app that lets you build a 3D world from your photos.

Thanks Noah Kagan for pointing me to the 17 pithy insights for startup founders.

With that, I’m off to BlogHer and to try to catch up on some of my email. Whew, another 33 came in since I posted last night. I thought leaving Microsoft would decrease my email load, but it increased it.