Jim Fawcette (my old boss and the guy who is very responsible for me being here today) recently posted something I just ran across (I don’t read his feeds cause they are partial text). Anyway, he was trying to make a point that Microsoft is practicing great PR (in an evil way). Pretty usual “the PR committee is using bloggers” kind of stuff until he got to this paragraph:

“A great example of astroturfing is an internal blog by a paid PR person that ostensibly criticizes Microsoft. The business press has lapped this up. I’m not criticising either Microsoft or the blog. It’s brillant! But let’s not pretend it is something it is not. This isn’t open criticism; it’s a distraction, like what magicians do to keep your eye off the real trick, or a pressure release value on a steam cooker.

“The paid, semi-critical blog distracts people from forming a nexus around an external blog, or from reading real, insightful, internal criticism of Microsoft, such as mini-Microsoft or Joel Splosky (with his great piece on How Microsoft Lost the API Wars). Check them out if you want criticism with more bite than gums.”

Now this sounds a lot like he’s talking about me. Oh, great, I alone am saving the world from harsh Microsoft criticism! Ouch!

But, let’s look at Jim’s claim a little deeper.

First, I was blogging before Mini (Joel, though, has been blogging longer than me) and I was hired before he started, or before Joel posted his famous API War piece. I was also one of the first bloggers to link to either of those. And, my employee goals state nothing about trying to keep people from paying attention to negative PR about Microsoft. Which, might explain why I’m not in the PR department.

Speaking of which, yesterday was my fifth “blogging birthday.” I started blogging December 15, 2000.

By the way, according to Bloglines, Joel Spolsky’s API War blog has 695 links. Now, quick, find a post of mine that has that many links. Even my most linked to post, my Corporate Weblogger Manifesto, has only been linked to 280 times. So, if I were supposed to keep people from reading Joel’s post, I have failed, and failed miserably.

It gets worse (or better, depending on how you’re following this).

When I visited Microsoft Ireland a couple of weeks ago and got a tour with my camcorder, every employee there said they read Mini. Most of the .NET user group members there said they read Mini. He’s been in Business Week (on the cover even!) And his posts get many times more comments than mine do. So, on the face of it, Jim Fawcette’s claims just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

So, if it’s Microsoft’s goal to keep you from reading those who disagree with Microsoft in some way, I’m failing miserably.

But, that’s not my goal. Thankfully. My goal is to listen to them, have a conversation with them, and see where we can improve.

Here’s some other posts asking Microsoft to improve.

Ed Bott is asking for Microsoft to open up its Office 12 NDAs. I’ll talk to the team about that. I think NDAs are often too restrictive and are ultimately counterproductive.

Kim Greenlee wants Microsoft to explain more clearly what the differences are between all the MSDN Subscriptions and the Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions are.

James Governor is worrying about what Microsoft will do with DRM in the future. Don’t worry, James, I’d quit if Microsoft ever put a kill code that it could call in your software like that.

Vinit Carpenter wrote a review of domains.live.com but wants us to remove the restrictions with the usage of Outlook.

Anyone else have anything that they want Microsoft to improve?

Whew, everyone seems to want to do a Web Conference in March. There’s SXSW. There’s O’Reilly’s ETech. And now Microsoft enters in with Mix 06.

I’m speaking at SXSW and I’m helping out on the Mix 06 team.

My first question is “will Bill Gates let us put a back channel up during his keynote?”

After watching the interchange at Les Blogs between Mena and Ben, I’d guess not, but you never know. This isn’t going to be a PDC or a TechED.

So, why do another Web conference?

Well, my trip through Europe punctuated why. I kept meeting businesspeople who had bet their businesses on Microsoft’s Web technologies. From Reuters to L’Oreal to Heineken to dozens of other CTO’s and CEOs that I met who told me they are using Microsoft technologies and wanted a way to learn only about those (since most of the other events are heavily LAMP-focused).

Does anyone else find it ironic that the Microsoft conference is the one with both a blog and an RSS button? Next thing you know Microsoft will be adding tags, making deals with Firefox and getting along with the Web Standards Project, and figuring out how to do great maps and great search. Hmmm.

Anyway, what Web conference are you going to in March? Hope to see you there.

Ross Mayfield talks about evil and marketing. I’ve been telling my friends that two kids from Stanford stole our evil and we want it back, damn it!

I didn’t realize that Wikipedia is evil, though. Damn, there goes my whole belief system. Oh, turn around evil and you get live. Hmmm, the opposite of evil is live. Yeah, don’t play that record backward. You might hear Steve Jobs saying that he’s loving Intel.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Dan Gillmor points to Nature Investigation that finds it comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.

Now that certainly isn’t evil.

Oh, and putting “Microsoft is Evil” finds 5,860 results on MSN Search. Putting “Google is Evil” in only finds 3,650 results. Ahh, we’re almost twice as evil as Google. Whew, our evil is safe for another day.

Steve Gillmor has the same conversation everywhere he goes. It seems.

Office is dead. Office is dead. Office is dead, he says. Except he uses 826 more words to say that.

He’s right.

That is if you compare Web 2.0 (of 2005) to Office 97.

Maybe we should just have had Steve Gillmor’s face on all those dinosaur ads.

But, Office still has some kick left in it. I’ve been using Office 12 for the past few days and, I can’t go back. The Excel pivot table feature alone is worth paying hundreds of dollars. Alone.

And tables are finally really cool. PowerPoint is actually something I’ll use again. Creating a chart there is sure a lot nicer than I’ve been able to do on any Web site.

Steve also hasn’t been paying attention to our secret weapon: workflow. Try to stick that in your Linux server and smoke it!

And now I see there’s new extensibility in OneNote 12.

I’m a card-carrying member of the Web 2.0 Working Group, but there isn’t anything as cool as OneNote coming out yet. Sorry. Not even close.

**Ray Ozzie slaps Scoble**

Oh, Ray, knock it off! We all know Gillmor’s favorite toy is Groove. We’re keeping that hidden away here until we need to use that to get Steve to attend another conference. Why? Cause it’s always fun arguing with Steve about whether or not Office is dead. Hell, according to my Word Counter (in the dead Office 2003) we just killed another 258 words doing just that. Heheh.

After I met Clare Dillon in Cork, Ireland, when we were there I wrote management and said that I was super impressed with the Microsoft team in Ireland and Clare was a big part of what impressed me.

She was the first of a string of women Maryam and I would meet that just impressed us both. From Anina, the model blogger, to Rebecca McKinnon, the former CNN correspondent who now is working to change the world rather than putting pablum news on our TV screens, to many others I’ll be writing about soon.

Anyway, I just saw Paschal Leloup’s pointer to an interview with Clare. He says “In case you don’t know who is Clare Dillon, she’s the person I stay in touch almost every day regarding the organisation of community events in Ireland. Clare is surely the most dynamic person I ever met in Microsoft, and she show her ‘vavavoom’ in this interview with Damien Mulley.”

Totally agreed. The software industry needs more like Clare.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog doesn’t get a press pass to MacWorld, but Dave Winer does, and Scott McNulty is pissed.Personally, I’d invite Dave to any conferences I’d do. And I’d invite other bloggers too. Speaking of which, Microsoft is going to announce a conference soon and I’m helping them decide on bloggers who should get invited to cover the event. It’s hard to be fair to everyone when you only can hand out a dozen or so free passes.

For those of you who don’t read Evelyn Rodriguez on a regular basis you might not realize she was caught in the Tsunami last year and you might also not realize she’s one of the best writers on the blogosphere. Anyway, today she wrote about Peter Drucker (the management guru who died recently) and also the Emergency Syndication panel at Syndicate.

You won’t find this stuff in Memeorandum, but she’s worth reading.

+++++++++++++

On the disaster topic, I’ve been following several friends as they visit New Orleans. Buzz Bruggeman visited Ernie the Attorney a few days ago. Ernie’s post is just stunning. It’s among the most gripping writing I’ve read this year.

Dave Winer just arrived in New Orleans and is doing his unique brand of podcasting and reporting. I’m sitting here in building 18 of Microsoft’s headquarters listening to his interview with Janet, a woman who lost her house. Ernie the Attorney lives in New Orleans and is doing wonderful journalism about what it’s like there. I remember spending the day with Ernie in happier times. We saw a concert and he showed me around town.

All of this stuff is magazine quality. Just stunning the imagery and misery that drips through these ASCII characters. Can we have a conversation on blogs? I don’t know, but these made me cry. So there.

Filed under: Blog Stuff @ 6:00 am # Comments (4)

Interesting analysis on Slate today:

“The cable companies have a clear advantage here, as does Microsoft with its Media Center PCs and the enormously popular Xbox. Apple will become a force here on the day when the iPod is expressly designed to plug into your television—not to mention your car stereo and broadband network. If Steve Jobs can make the iPod an entertainment hub, Apple will be the company to beat, a feat it could never accomplish with personal computers.”

For those of you using Web Services, there’s an extensive Web Service Security guide that was just delivered by Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team.

Ben Metcalfe (the guy who got Mena to swear on stage) writes about some issues that he feels the blogosphere needs to address. A few things. 1) I find I can hold real conversations with a video camera and/or a Web forum and/or Skype and record it and put it up. Maybe someone should give Ben an invite to audioblog.com?

As to persona representation, sorry, I don’t go with you on this one. When I worked at Fawcette I saw someone get fired for getting drunk at a party and hitting, inappropriately, on my coworkers. At NEC I saw someone get fired for posting racist remarks in a Web forum. Neither case was really an example of behavior that was connected to the company’s official business, but the reality is that if you work for a company and you’re identifyable with that company you’re ALWAYS representing that company.

Ben, you’re generally the only interaction I have with the BBC. Think about that for a moment. To ME you ARE the BBC. Well, you and Ian, who I meet at geek dinners in London.

If you do something that gets back to your boss and it sufficiently pisses him or her off there’s not going to be much you can do about it, sorry. Tell the BBC’s biggest advertiser to screw off and die at a party and see how long you’ll last there.

As to marketing, it’s a messy business. The one thing I look out for is transparency. We all know Hugh Macleod is getting paid to hawk Stormhoek. And that’s OK. If we didn’t know I’d be screaming left and right.

Just like you all know I work for Microsoft.