Stefan Constantienescu has been a reader of my blog for a long time (and hangs out on Channel 9). When he told me about his plans for buying a new computer that he couldn't afford, I wanted to hold off on posting it and see if he could make something happen on his own.

He did. He raised $1,000.

Let's go further and get him a MacBook. That costs $2,000 plus taxes (I might be able to get him an employee discount via my brother-in-law which would help). I'll throw in a copy of Windows XP so he can switch back and forth every day (his whole schtick was "make me switch").

Personal note to Tara Hunt: you don't exist.

Oh, sorry, for everyone else, I'm just having some fun with Tara. She notes that big companies like Microsoft are gonna have a tough time getting it.

Totally agreed.

But, we have our secret weapons: Technorati and Bloglines and Feedster and NewsGator and IceRocket and other blog search engines.

They let us listen like a small startup.

The problem is, even when we hear, it takes a lot of convincing internally.

But, even there, we have another secret weapon: internal blogs. Email mailing lists. Lunch meetings. And social pressure.

Tara applies the social pressure. Which is why she's not invisible.

She's also onto something.

Big companies don't get small things. I was talking about that with a bunch of MBA students last night. The average billionaire executive doesn't understand why you'd speak to 100 MBA students. After all, Bill Gates could buy a full page ad in the New York Times and not notice the money missing from his account, right?

But, that's why my email is on my blog. Why my cell phone is on my blog (it's down at the right, and, yes, I do answer it, if I'm not in an interview or something like that).

By the way, I deleted all my feeds and am starting over. Tara's one of the first I added back in.

Jamie has a new C9Park cartoon titled "Browser Wars: 'A new (IE) hope.'"

I almost spit tea out my nose when I saw "Han Scoble." Heheh.

Funny, I just got off of a Southwest airline from San Jose to Seattle and found out that Southwest now has a blog. There's more on Memeorandum.

It's a pretty cold blog so far. It's the kind of blog I think most corporations will start out with. Safe. Take no chances. Don't piss anyone off. Don't reveal anything that the PR team isn't comfortable with.

That's OK, I guess. Most Microsoft blogs are just as boring. So can't throw stones when we live in a glass house.

But, I spend a great deal of my life on Southwest planes. Some things that I'd love to see?

Their IT system rocks. Who developed it, how is it built? Was it done in Java, or VB or C#? What does their data center look like?

What are some traveling tips? Here's one: There are two rows of exit row seats. The first row doesn't recline.

Second, if you fly Southwest ALWAYS check in online (you can do that starting 24 hours before your flight). That'll get you into the "A" or "B" group which will almost guarantee you a decent seat and that your carryon luggage will get on board.

Some other things I'd love to know? Is there free WiFi near their counters anywhere? What's the best restaurant in each airport?

Who makes the most reliable luggage?

Some craft definitely have funnier crews than others. Any way to know whether you'll be on one of those flights?

As a geek I like sitting near the front of the plane where I can see the door. They let me use my Tablet PC or cell phone up to the minute that the door closes. I answered several emails this morning using my Verizon card while waiting for everyone else to load onboard.

Others? What are their favorite online travel resources? (Flight trackers, etc).

Where do they go when they want to have fun on a layover?

Anyway, nice to see more companies try to figure out how to engage with the blogs and, yes, I am nuts about Southwest.

They are a no-frills airline, but generally have the lowest prices when we fly (which is why Maryam switched us to them). One thing, though, their service is almost always better than other airlines I fly, especially in baggage handling — my bags on other airlines can take 20 minutes to show up, but not on Southwest.

Southwest takes a bit of time to get used to (they give everyone a boarding card with "A", "B", or "C" on it, and first on gets the best seats, if you're last on often there won't be space for your luggage so it'll have to be checked). Plus they don't have meals or video screens, at least on the short flights I'm usually on.

Disclaimer: I got these for free to try out, although I'll be giving away both things at the Gnomedex conference in June. The iPod player I got before I set my policy of not accepting free stuff. The U3 drive I got because I didn't have time to sit through Nathan's demo and wanted to try it out. When I received them I made no promises to them about the coverage I would give them, or even IF there would be coverage coming. If I ever have a conflict of interest, I will disclose that to my readers.

 +++++

So, last night, Nathan Gold, developer evangelist for U3, shows me a new kind of USB Thumb Drive. He had one loaded up, gave it to me, and said "try this out."

I'm playing with it now. It's a 1GB flash memory drive that plugs into my USB port. But it isn't a normal memory key. When you plug it in it automatically adds a new menu in the system tray. That pulls up a ton of software that Nathan put on my key for me.

Turns out it fools my PC into thinking it's a CD-ROM drive that auto starts.

This is a radical way to distribute test software. Why? Cause I unplug my key and any software I run disappears along with it (and any traces, including any temp files I've downloaded — I got the Maxthon browser on the key, for instance. As soon as I unplug it everything goes away, even registry entries).

Whoa. More details on the U3 site.

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

Maryam has an iPod Nano, so back when I was at CES, when I saw the Xitel HiFi-Link for iPod, I wanted to try it to see if it was really good. Lots of my friends have iPods, so thought this was unique.

It's a box that you hook up to your AV system at home that lets you dock a Nano and play the music off of it onto your AV system.

It does exactly what it says it'll do, is well designed (looks just as stylish as Maryam's iPod) and sounds awesome on our AV system. If you're looking for a way to connect your iPod to your AV system, this is worth considering.

On both of these products I'll buy one after giving these away at Gnomedex.

First, I got a ton of questions about Eye-Fi. First, Eye-Fi's URL is http://www.eye.fi/.

Second, here's answers to a bunch of the questions received in my comments today about the Eye-Fi device:

Rob said "you could just get a WiFi or Bluetooth enabled camera." True. They had one of those, a Nikon, at the offices, but it wasn't easy to use. It didn't work with services like Flickr and Nikon programmed it to be just a replacement for a USB cable. Eye-Fi could do a LOT more, and because Eye-Fi aren't locked into a specific manufacturer's choices, it could work with a lot more interesting stuff. The Xbox scenario, for instance, that I put out there isn't possible with the Nikon WiFi camera.

Also, there are more than 100 million digital cameras already sold that don't have any wireless capabilities.

Jake asked "$100 for what exactly?" Well, let's say a 1GB SD Memory card costs about $60 to $100 retail. Well, Eye-Fi could make a card that has BOTH a WiFi system on it, as well as the memory, for $100 to $150. Yuval didn't want to talk pricing because it really depends on a lot of factors (he thinks there's a subsidization model possible where companies with services, like Ofoto, that make money, could pay to subsidize cards). So, the amount you'd pay at retail could greatly vary. But would certainly be a lot less than you'd pay for a new WiFi-enabled camera.

Chris asks "I would love to know how this works." Unfortunately I can't give away all the details, Eye-Fi hasn't finished the development and Yuval asked me not to talk about how it works technically. But it works, and it works easily (or it could, depending on partnerships that still need to be finalized — keep in mind this technology is still in alpha stage, so some of what I talk about here won't work when the final product ships, and other things that we haven't thought about might be enabled). Another scenario that could be made to work? You go out and shoot. You come home. You turn on your camera. Your photos are automatically pushed to Flickr.

Chris Wood says: "it would be too simple but many cameras have a video out connector that you can just plug into the yellow RCA jack at the front of the tv."

Um, Chris, I don't even know where the cords are for my camera, and my TV doesn't have an input on the front of the TV. Also, so you can hook your camera up to the TV. That solves that scenario. Now, your friends ask you to print. What do you do? Or, you want to put the photos on Flickr? What do you do? Get out more cords. Geeky.

Diane says: "Unless it is as easy as pressing ONE button, it still wouldn’t work."

Hey, Diane, you'd love this. No buttons to push. Just turn your camera on when you're within your WiFi network at home (or possibly at WiFi hotspots that are open around the world) and everything happens — automatically. When he took my picture my picture appeared on his computer without him touching the camera further. Obviously there's a bit of setup, but that's easy. Anyone who can use a Web browser could setup the system.

>Doesn’t the 360 already support plugging the camera into it directly through USB?

Yes, but again, I have to have cords. If cords are so cool, why are the Xbox 360s controllers wireless?

>It’s ok if your camera doesn’t have wifi but memory cards are the wrong place to put wifi I think.

You don't need as much memory if you have an Eye-Fi. Why? Cause your camera's memory is just a cache. As soon as you're within a WiFi hotspot the camera could spit the photos to your favorite photo sharing site (BubbleShare, for instance, lets you upload and download full photo files, so you wouldn't need to store them on the local camera).

Also, someone asked about metal cases on cameras. The Canon he demoed to me had a metal case and the WiFi worked just fine. Keep in mind that the WiFi antenna AND the memory are stored on the same card. It's amazing what the miniturization has done due to cell phone R&D. I remember the engineers at Winnov back a decade ago struggled to get less stuff onto a card the size of my hand, much less the size of my thumbnail. That's why it was inspiring to me.

Scott says: "One thing all these kinds of tools should have is the ability to read the EXIF data and rotate the picture on screen for you (ala Picasa)."

This does exactly that, and a lot more. Want your photos to automatically go to Costco for printing? You could do that. In addition to possibly sending them to Picasa, or to Flickr, or to other services or to your Media Center PC.

I want one. I'll throw away my SD memory card when this comes out.

As seen on Digg: Whatever Happened to the IE 6 Team?

Actually, that's a bit sensationalism. It's an interview with Michael Wallent, former head of the IE team (now runs the Windows Presentation Foundation team).

One reason I leave my phone number on my blog is so people and friends can call and tell me why they think something is worth paying attention to.

Sam Gentile just called.

I listen when he calls. He's a talented and influential software developer.

What did he call about? Scott Bellware's essay on "Mort or Elvis: A Question for a Bygone Era."

Sam called this the best post of the year on his blog.

I think Sam expected me to defend our developer personas. I won't. Something bothers me about them too. Not the least of which is that I am not even skilled enough to be a Mort. A sub-Mort, if you will. The names sound too elitist. And they are.

It's time to get rid of them. Good call Sam and Scott.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that personas aren't a valuable way to force you to think about your customers and the roles that they play. But these just don't work anymore and the names are horrible.

Yet another example of how naming matters.

So, if you're like Chris Pirillo you have a large plazma screen in your family room. An Xbox 360 sits next to it. A Media Center is off in the office somewhere else in the house.

OK, we're not all like Chris (I don't have a large screen yet cause I can't afford it, but I'm saving up — the money I save every month on coffee alone that I'm not drinking will probably cover payments on one) but Yuval Koren, CEO of Eye-Fi showed me something that could make my life better.

What's the pain?

Digital cameras. I bought my wife a Nikon S1. It takes an SD memory card. But her computer doesn't have an SD slot. So now anytime she wants to see her pictures she's gotta hook up an SD card contraption that hooks into one of her USB ports. That's OK. But her computer is slow, is upstairs.

We want to look at photos downstairs on our TV (especially once we get that big screen we're saving up for).

Now, if you're a geek (or have one in the house) this is just a minor anoyance. But you have to have a Media Center PC. Hook the SD card reader up to that. Copy all the photos into its Photos folder. And then use the Xbox 360 downstairs to display those photos using the Media Center extender capabilities.

Whew, that's a mouthful. Now, try telling a non-technical person how to do that. "Forget it" will be the answer.

In fact, in my discussions with Doug Rowan (former CEO of Corbis) he tells me that there are many people who never even hook up their digital camera to a computer. Both Doug and Yuval tell me the fastest growing part of the photo business is those "photo printing kiosks" that you see at Costco, Kinkos, or other stores.

Yuval has a better idea. Why not put a little WiFi radio into the SD card and have it automatically send your photos?

What a scenario!

Imagine if I just could turn on my wife's Nikon and have the photos displayed via my Xbox 360 on my new big screen after I get it?

My 360 has WiFi — I bought the WiFi kit that got it on my 802.11 a/b/g network. Most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing, but with Eye-Fi it could do a lot more.

Yuval demonstrated exactly that for me today. He has built a WiFi radio on a chip (it is also a memory card, the one he showed me had 256MB of RAM, but he said Eye-Fi will build a variety of sizes up to 1GB to start). Cost? Pretty affordable. Around $100. Availability? Hopefully this year, he says (it's in alpha testing right now). Funded? Via Angel Funding, looking for more funding as Eye-Fi moves to production.

Seeing this is just inspiring.

The On10.net folks interviewed a pilot and got a look at how navigation is done in the skies. I saw a Delta pilot sitting in Seattle's airport planning out his next flight with almost the same setup. Any pilots out there? What do you use to navigate and plan your trips?

Greg Duncan likes the new name: Windows PowerShell.

Hey, a two-word name! Kudos to the marketing department.

Why rename Monad? Well, replace the "M" with a "G" and you can see one theory of why the name had to be changed. I still like Monad, though.

Wikipedia entry on Monad.

I hear the new name will be announced officially tomorrow this morning and that the Monad blog will have more details then.

Don't know what Monad is? Jeffrey Snover, in this Channel 9 video, explains and demos.

Update: the new PowerShell blog is now up.

Fun party last night with the Internet Explorer team. Jeremiah, blogger at Hitachi Data Systems, wrote and did a podcast from the party (famous bloggers and press folks were there, like Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Mike Arrington). The IE blog has more details and Memeorandum has even more.

I'm interviewing the Hotmail team (er, Windows Live Mail) today, and meeting with a variety of other people and speaking tonight at Pepperdine University's management event in Santa Clara so won't post much today.

Since I'm in Silicon Valley this week, working a mere mile or two from Google's headquarters (I'm sitting in Microsoft's cafeteria) I wanted to make sure no one confused me and Matt Cutts (Google's top blogger) together, so that's the shirt I'm wearing today. Thanks Matt! (great branding, by the way).

Oh, heck, enough fun and games. John Tokash pays me the best compliment about UMPCs, er, Origamis: "I missed Robert Scoble at the Faire. Too bad - I would have congratulated him in person for being absolutely right about the UMPC."

Just in case you haven't had enough of me lately, I've been making the rounds. Here's a bunch of recordings:

1. Me and Shel Israel speaking at Microsoft Research.
2. Me and Shel speaking at BA Ventures (we were on fire after Amazon).
3. John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing, interviewed me for his podcast.

I'm probably going to take the rest of the day off to work on Channel 9 stuff. The IE team is having a launch event tonight that I'm going to take AnandM, India's famous .NET blogger, to.

On the top of my list are the folks who put together the world's biggest water balloon fight on behalf of the Xbox team!

Anyone who gets 2,950 people out to throw 50,000 balloons 50,000 people at a Microsoft marketing event is freaking awesome in my book!

Forget marketing. Forget trying to evangelize products or all that. Sometimes on my tour around Microsoft I meet simply incredible people who do things like drop everything within a few hours of a disaster halfway across the country and fly to New Orleans to help the Red Cross and victims and their families. I'm lucky enough to have gotten Jim and Dan's KatrinaSafe story onto video. They set a very high bar for the rest of us to reach up to whenever other human beings are in need. Shows that, yes, even geeks can help out during disasters.

The interview is a bit long, but eventually we get into what they learned from the experience. This interview might help a community the next time there's a disaster. I'm wondering how Microsoft can help BEFORE the next disaster hits?

Disclaimer, I have not shown this post to anyone, particularly my employer, er Microsoft. The ideas it contains are not vetted, and probably won't agree with anyone else's ideas.

OK, maybe you haven't heard about Mini-Microsoft yet, but if you care even a little bit about what Microsoft is, you've probably read his blog (he was featured on the cover of Business Week a while back). In my tours around Microsoft it's a rare employee who tells me he or she doesn't read Mini.

Sometimes an employee asks "don't you think they would try to shut Mini down?" (Mini is an anonymous blogger, who generally talks about things that Microsoft is doing wrong, and/or that he wants to see improved. His motto is to, by slimming down Microsoft, make Microsoft a more lean profit-making machine).

I say, no, cause I think he's doing a lot of good for the company and even if you don't agree with that point of view if Mini were fired I'd quit on the spot. I don't think the way you deal with dirty laundry is to get rid of the person hanging the laundry in the public square that way. Deal with the folks who are dirtying up the linen!

But, I'm going to use Mini as a metaphor for the angst that surrounds Microsoft, both internally with its employees, and externally with its customers and shareholders. I'm not talking about physically shutting down his blog or silencing him via censorship. No, I'm talking about taking away his reason for being. His karmic power.

Now, admittedly, I'm going on a small, but decent sized sample. I've interviewed more than 500 employees over two years (and talked with hundreds, maybe even thousands, more) and I've met thousands of our customers and shareholders on trips to conferences, VC firms, camps, private parties, and corporate meetings.

In my travels around Bill Gates' empire I do my usual Channel 9 stuff, but off camera lately I've been asking "how can we make Microsoft better?"

See, I've decided to stick around and make Microsoft better. I own a very very very small slice of Microsoft and so as an employee owner I figure I gotta do my part.

And, generally, what I'm finding on my tours is angst. Angst over stock price (it's gone up about $3 since I've joined three years ago). Angst over marketing issues (why do we make cool names like "Sparkle" lame by changing that to "Expression Interactive Designer?") Angst over vision and direction. Angst over leadership. Angst over advertising like our "dinosaur" ads (which are loudly derided by customers whenever I go to conferences and talk about how we're being perceived).

Yet, on the other hand, our angst is tempered by great products and marketing in other places. Everyone who owns a 360 praises it when I meet with them face-to-face (and I love their advertising and marketing, except that they can't ship enough to fill demand). Good feelings are still flowing over the Mix06 conference (several people remarked on that to me today at Makers Faire). Visual Studio's launch events were mostly overflowing. In Ireland, when I was there, people told me that the events there were standing room only. Our Atlas project is getting kudos. Our Live.com gadgets are seeing sizeable community adoption. MSN Messenger has 170 million active users every month. Hotmail, 200 million. MSN Spaces, tens of millions of active spaces. Whew, what is there to complain about?

I had a huge surge of pride in Microsoft today when I saw a very cool booth that we had at Makers Faire. Robots. People teaching kids to program computers. Xboxes. Media Centers. UMPCs (another lame name for "Origami's" — one fun thing was I was in the booth when someone was holding a UMPC and then asked "can I see the Origamis?" Um, you're holding one, was the answer.)

But, that's off topic here. Back on topic. There are legitimate things to work on improving. If there weren't, Mini's blog wouldn't exist, or at least, no one would pay any attention to it. So, my thoughts over the past two weeks led to this rant:

How Microsoft can take away Mini-Microsoft's karmic power.

Apologies to Martin Luther King.

I have a dream.

I dream of a Microsoft that no longer has anything for Mini, or his commenters to complain about. I dream of a day where every Microsoft employee feels like they are part of a mission, a positive mission for the improvement of all humankind. Where they feel like they are being compensated fairly, and if they don't feel it's fair, that they at least see what behaviors will bring better compensation. Where Microsoft customers and shareholders feel excited by our vision, marketing, and service execution again and will go on blogs and in BusinessWeek and say "they turned a corner."

See, employees tell me they hit too many policies. Bureacracy. Politics. Committeeisms. And too much centralization of power and decision making authority. They also tell me they don't feel like we're on a mission to improve the world, like Gates led in the 1980s with his cry "a computer should be on every desktop." That they don't feel pride in our advertising and marketing and naming. That they feel we aren't making the kind of "bet the company" bets that Microsoft had in the past, like when a strategic decision had been made to go with Windows over OS/2.

So, I've been thinking about it for a couple of weeks. How do we tune up Microsoft's economic engine and get ready for the 2010's?

In September a new generation will enter high school. I call it the "Second Life" generation. They live in a world of always connected high-speed broadband. In a world that has computers that have more graphical power than our most powerful ones just 10 years ago. Where ubiquitous computing isn't a far-off-dream, but something pushed in their face every minute of every day as they see digital displays in classrooms, in shopping malls, in airports, and at movie theaters. They expect their cell phones to do a lot more than just phone their parents. They carry around laptops or Tablet PCs or, maybe soon, ultra mobile PCs that are hooked up through increasingly uniquitous wireless networks. I saw a guy yesterday who was building wifi networks for poor areas in Africa. By 2014 I can't imagine many places in the world without wireless access.

It is a world where they want to make their own experiences. MySpace looks passe to this new generation. Second Life, with its 3D world that can not just be controlled, but produced factory style from pre-built components, along with easy customizations, is where it's at.

It's also a world where the competition has changed. Now you can run Windows in a virtual area on OSX. Windows could be controlled by Apple. Or, by Linux. Once Windows users try OSX, why would they want to use Windows anymore? What's the value proposition? What will bring scarcity or differentiation to the Windows world? Our shareholders are worried, maybe not shortterm, but I notice the stock price isn't going up, even though the Xbox is doing tremendously well (and, actually, most of our product lines are seeing sizeable revenue and profit growth).

What will this generation expect as they move from high school, in the year 2010, to college? What will they expect as they move from college, in the year 2014, to the workforce?

I dream of that world tonight and see that Microsoft must change to be relevant to the Second Life Generation's world.

First, we need a big dream. A moonshot. The kind of challenge that'll keep our newly-hired rock stars minds engaged. That'll give everyone in the company pride when it's accomplished. The kind of goal that'll take four, or maybe even eight years to accomplish. For the Second Life Generation. But, don't stop there. It should be for everyone. It's just that this next generation is going to expect something a lot bigger than just a few gigs of email space.

What's the moonshot? A guaranteed Terabyte of Internet-based storage space for EVERYTHING and for EVERYONE running Windows in the world.

A simple vision. Yes, Mr. Gates, it'll cost billions. We'll need dozens, maybe even hundreds, of data centers around the world. All with state-of-the-art connections. All with state-of-the-art 64-bit servers. All with state-of-the-art backup systems. All with state-of-the-art power and cooling systems. All with state-of-the-art load balancing and data serving technologies. That stuff isn't cheap. But I hear we have a few bucks we can use in such a "bet the company" effort.

In this terabyte, integrate all of the new Live services into one data store. A sort of "WinFS" for our server farms. Why shouldn't Live Mail share the same data store as Live Local or Live Expo? Think about the searching, and data presenting, features our developers could build quickly if we had a common data store with a common framework and a common set of APIs!

"But, Robert, almost every 'big bet' that Microsoft tries doesn't work out," you might say. That isn't true. Just study the history of SQL Server. Of Windows. Of Xbox. We make big bets and stick with most of them, even as they don't look like they'll work out in the marketplace. Yeah, I know we have put a few back on the shelf, but for the most part when the company decides on something big, it sticks with it.

It's time to do that again. Give us all a mission we would get excited by.

"But, Robert, you don't have smart enough employees to do this," you might say. Sorry, as I walk around Microsoft Research, as I walk around the .NET team, as I walk around Ray Ozzie's new team, as I walk around the Live.com team, I realize that we not only have enough smart employees, more are coming every day (welcome Niall and Steve Berkowitz).

But, we do need to make some changes to ensure that every employee is engaged in their work here at Microsoft to make this kind of "big bet" not just a possibility, but an eventuality.

That leads me to the second way of how Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft: buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell machine with dual monitors running Windows Vista. And do it now.

I've seen the productivity benefits that dual monitors can bring. Every employee who has them says having two monitors is transformational. Especially coders who can have one screen for typing code and another for designing UIs. Or, even if they are just an algorithm kind of person, the second one keeps their email showing so they don't need to switch over when a new email shows up.

Heck, I'd go further. If we want to reach the Second Life generation we need three screens. One to run Second Life (and other kinds of social apps), one to run Visual Studio, and one to run Outlook. Or something like this. Go and watch the researchers at Microsoft Research who are working on multiple screen interfaces. They told me that industry researchers are seeing somewhere between a five to 15% productivity gain when someone goes from one monitor to two.

And, I, and my coworkers in the Evangelism team are now running Windows Vista and finding we're more productive, even WITH the burps that come from using pre-production code. I can't stand using XP anymore after using Vista for a few weeks.

But, as I go around Microsoft there are way too many employees who aren't running Vista and who don't have two monitors.

Want a morale boost? How about buying a new high-end computer, with dual monitors, running Vista for every employee? This would cost around $240 million, if my math is good. But wouldn't that be a great recruiting tool? Wouldn't it help us ship better products faster? Wouldn't it help us see the areas where Vista needs improvement (and, as good as it is, it does need improvements).

Think about the statement that would make to the industry. "We believe in Windows Vista." That's what that would say. And, as customers came onto campus to visit us, as the Chinese President did a week ago, they would see the benefits of having fast computers, with two monitors, running Windows Vista.

And, because we retooled our entire infrastructure, we'd be ready to build the next version of Windows after Vista and would have a ready base of computers to test it on. In fact, we could increase our stress program to use 60,000 new high-speed desktops around the world all running the same OS. Think about the data THAT would generate. No other company in the world would be willing, or able, to make such a bet on the future of operating systems.

That leads me to the third way we could transform Microsoft, er, shut down Mini-Microsoft:

Change employee behavior through public compensation change logs.

This will be the most controversial item. But, how do you change my behavior? Don't like it? Decrease my pay. Nothing tells me better that my behavior isn't what the company wants. Mini wants to go further and wants to see mass firings. That would throw our local economy into chaos and would get rid of potentially good people (I come at it another way, the worst person I've dealt with here at Microsoft is far better than many employees I've dealt with in past jobs, so all we'd be doing by mass firings is helping our competition out and removing brains we'll need to get some big jobs done). I'd rather take a four-year-approach. Remember, this is the Second Life generation. Let's make a Microsoft that's rocking and rolling for 2010 when they get out of high school.

Let's have compensation changes put into public. Say I get a four percent raise. Tell everyone. Let's say my managers don't believe I'm adding value here. They could leave my compensation where it is. After four years of public embarrassment (yes, we'd explain that 0%'ers aren't good, that 2%'ers are OK, that 6%'ers are above average, and that anything above that is way above average).

This would require a major change to our culture. To one that's more transparent. But, over time, it would cause me to change my behavior. "Hey, why does Charles always get 10% raises?" Think about the conversations that would start inside the company.

"But, what if I think your treatment by the company is unfair?" Say I got a 20% raise and you don't think I'm worth that. Well, now you can complain and rally your co-workers and go and sit down with my management so you can see why they think I'm worth that. Or, on the other side of the coin, let's say I got a 0% raise and you think I got screwed. Well, now you'd be able to see my management and find out their side of the story as well as maybe work on my behalf to get me a raise.

OK, this is such a major change that I doubt we could implement that all at once. How about internally only? How about you can only see anonymous names in your group? So you can see how you measured up against other people in your group and you can ask your manager something like "I see that three people in our group got bigger raises than I did, why is that and what can I do to get a raise next time around?"

By doing at least part of this in an open way management would be able to reward those who were taking risks, updating their skills, and learning new, and more productive behaviors. I talked with a developer manager last week who told me about his group's use of Scrum, for instance. I asked "why did you change to a scrum model?" (His group had just won and award for increasing productivity). He said it was due to his belief that every employee should continually educate him/herself about the best practices in the industry and one of his employees had been to a scrum training and found that it could be useful to the team. They tried it and it was hugely useful. Why isn't that team rewarded for trying something new that paid off? For changing their behavior?

And why aren't they rewarded in public, which would encourage other employees to change their behavior and look for better ways to do things?

Speaking of better ways to do things. How about number four?

Get rid of corporate speed bumps. All around Microsoft you hear about the speed bumps. Some of which are there for very good reasons. (Er, corporate pain in the past). But, some of which are just there cause "they've always been done that way." Some of the good ones? Policies to ensure that security reviews have been done on code before checking that code in. But, we've all met a rule that just seems past its due date.

So, can we build a culture that removes rules on a regular basis, or at least looks at updating them for efficiency's sake?

Can we give a little bonus to managers who kill rules? Remove bureacracy? Slash through politics? Exceed expectations?

Of course we can. Make a little game. Imagine if Steve Ballmer posted on an internal blog "here's a rule I killed today." And did that every week. Or every day.

OK, it's 1:30 a.m. Time to rap this little ditty up with #5 on my list of ways Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft.

Force marketers to explain their decisions — in public on their blogs.

Say a marketer names something. Like, say, changes the name "Sparkle" to "Expression Interactive Designer." That person should have to explain their changes in public and sign their names to those changes. If it's a group, the group must sign their names. And must leave comments open so they can take the public scorn if names aren't good.

Heck, I wish this were true of every team. Come up with a new UI for your product? Explain it in public. Come up with a new product that you plan to sell? Explain it to us in clear english and have a conversation with us. Come up with a new logo? Explain why that logo matters. In public. Come up with a way to spend $500 million in advertising? Explain it to us.

Personally, the biggest drag on our morale internally is our advertising and the face we put out to the public. Having a bunch of different RSS icons out there is just an artifact of the problem — one that we aren't solving. We aren't putting a good face to the public. We aren't picking names that have any chance of being popular.

Here's a hint. In the top 100 brand names, as rated by BusinessWeek (PDF), NONE have more than two words in them.

We should make it publicly embarrassing for any employee, or group of employees, to come up with ANY name that has more than two words in it.

So, five things that Microsoft can do to get ready for the Second Life generation.

What do you think? Even if you think I'm on some good drugs, why don't you put forward your ideas instead of just tearing mine down. It's easy to tear down other people's ideas. It's hard to come up with interesting ideas to push things forward.

Hate Microsoft? Well, replace your company's name in whereever I said Microsoft. Every company I've worked for has similar problems to what Microsoft is facing. Even the small companies I worked for didn't make most efficient use of employees possible. Even "hot" companies like Google or Apple are looking for ways to make sure its employees are happy and well engaged in the problems ahead of them.

I figured that complaining about the problems wasn't anywhere near as interesting as proposing some solutions. Anyway, that's the kinds of dreams I've had the past two weeks. Hope they lead to productive conversations in your workplace and mine.

By Robert Scoble — I've been to a lot of conferences and events. Last week I was at the Webmaster World Pubcon.

What was remarkable about that? The pubcrawl. That's where the "pub" part of "PubCon" came from.

Huh?

What's even worse is that very little alcohol gets consumed on these things. Turns out the average drink order per attendee is about one beer.

Every attendee I talked to said that it was the best part of that conference. And that conference is no loser. I attended several sessions and I learned a lot at each one. Things like this:

Did you know that Google treats words connected by underscores, like_this, as one word? Google sees that as likethis. Matt Cutts of Google explained why that is (coders at Google needed ways to find variable names in their code). He recommended using hyphens, like-this, instead. Why? Cause the search engine treats those as separate words, like this.

Now, why did that little tip matter? Well, he was looking at someone's code on stage. They were doing it the wrong way and it was hurting their standings in the search engine. It was the kind of tip that you only get if you go to Web Master style conferences with experts who know why things work one way, and not another, on stage.

So, that's one kind of conference experience. The "expert on stage."

But there's another few kinds. Dave Winer's BloggerCon was interesting because he not only had experts on stage that knew a topic well, but he got the audience involved in the session. That works when you have an audience that has experts in it too. Last week I also had dinner with Steve Garfield, who is one of the Video Bloggers who is pushing that craft along (he had a video blog before I was doing Channel 9 at Microsoft). Watch how the VLoggerCon that's coming up has just as many good ideas coming from the audience as it does coming from the stage. It'll be interesting to see which sessions are more the traditional "old style" expert on stage, or the new, unconference style, where the guy on stage both presents and gets audience members involved. The new style doesn't work all the time, though, only when there's enough experts in the audience.

For instance, today at Makers Faire there was a guy who had been blowing bubbles for 30 years. 30 years! There was NO ONE in the audience who could even come close to this guy's skill and mastery of his topic area. He was incredible. Bubbles in bubbles. All sorts of stuff. Used specialized equipment I've never seen until today (to generate smoke for the bubbles). But, he did get the audience involved and took questions. We learned that he used the general low-cost soap that comes in most bubble bottles. More high-tech, albeit stronger, bubble solutions containing glycerine didn't work as well (he explained why, but that's off topic here).

You can also get an audience to participate, I saw one guy, who was expert at building paper airplanes, get the entire audience involved by helping them build their own airplane. That was a lot of fun and the guy was just unbelieveable. I have one of his airplanes that he built out of two sheets of paper. A biplane!

But, now onto my point. I saw the future of conferences today. It was the Makers Faire.

What was special about it? Well, first, it was low-cost. And my son got in for free. This totally changed the attendance model that we see at most geeky conferences. A lot more women. Families.

Then, inside the front gate was a major sign that this was no VSLive or TechED. There was a firetruck. But instead of putting out fires, it made them! High into the air it blew a puff of fire with an impressive repercussion. It caught my attention.

But, walking through the place I saw all sorts of bizarre things. A cofounder of Apple Computer playing polo with friends on Segways. Robots. Weird cars and other rideable contraptions. Wind-catching generators. Inside the main hall were all sorts of contraptions and screens. And something fun, the kids were encouraged to put their hands on and try them out!

Inside the main hall there was a stage. Ah-ha, a conference! But it was surrounded by experiences. Things you'd remember the rest of your life. Puzzles. Robots. People dressed weirdly.

As someone said it was a Burning Man lite.

This is the future of conferences. Can you give me an experience I've never had? Can you give me something to take pictures of? Will you educate me? (I learned how to weld, how to make a wind-powered generator, how to program computers, how to ride a Segway, some new things to do in Second Life, and more).

The Make Magazine crowd had 10s of thousands of people come through their doors in two days. It was a watershed moment for me and I told both Phillip Torrone and Tim O'Reilly that when I saw them.

What's the next ExperienceCon? Some possibilities: Gnomedex. Pop!Tech.

More later, battery is dead. The city is dark!

I see some people are talking about Technorati's top 100 blogs list (more on this issue on Memeorandum) and the fact that several MSN Spaces blogs appeared in high spots on that list in the past few days and that some "A list" bloggers, like Dave Winer, were no longer on the list. Today at the Maker Faire I bumped into head technologist for Technorati, Tantek Celik, and founder Dave Sifry. Both said that there was a bug in the code that generated that list that should be fixed by tomorrow. The bug let the list follow blogrolls that used the "nofollow" HTML attribute, which made some blogs appear higher than they should have.

Oh, looks like the bug fix has been checked in. Dave Winer's famous blog is back on the list. 

BY ROBERT SCOBLE — SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (somewhere above the Golden Gate bridge) — Maryam Scoble, last Thursday, said "I like Bubba's blog better than yours." (She's my wife).

Ahh, you think I don't take abuse? Heheh.

But I agree with her. That was a fun experiment. Bubba, you want another week? It'd make Maryam happy.

Anyway, why am I writing from a bench high above the Golden Gate bridge?

Because it's part of my new scheme to have and share unique experiences in technology with you.

More on that in the next post.

But, first, how did I survive having two weeks off? It was nice, actually. I gotta do that more often. It was good for my soul. Linda Stone told me a while back to make sure I'm taking care of myself and my family as much as I'm taking care of the blog. I didn't listen to her then, but she was right.

So, anyway, nature put on quite a show for me sitting on this bench. The city looked like a spotlight was on it. The light is getting lower every second now. It's remarkable when you think of all the geeky stuff going on in that small city below my little bench.

The Golden Gate bridge, to me, is a symbol of high technology. People come from around the world to walk on it. Take pictures of it. But within a two-hour drive from it much of the world's technology is produced. There is no other place like it for technologists in the world.

Well, I'm gonna step into my car. My hands are freezing. And it's getting a bit dark. I'll probably make my way across the bridge to post about the Makers' Faire Patrick and I attended today and why it inspired me to change how I approach my blog, events, and technology.

In the meantime (it might be an hour) read Engadget's coverage of the Maker Faire and check out my photos from the day. Yes, that was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak playing Segway Polo.

by: bubba murarka

The personal goals for this week of guest blogging were to share some perspective on working at MSFT in the Silicon Valley, learn what its like to blog on a widely read Microsoft related blog, and tell some stories about "growing up at Microsoft".  It was both an opportunity and an experiment that would hopefully benefit all parties involved.  Robert would continue to have some time/space to find the right balance for himself.  Readers would continue to get a "human driven perspective" of Microsoft and get some interesting links.  Interesting content would still get linked too and found by people who could benefit/add value to it.  I would grow in a way that can only happen by doing something different from my normal life.   

Robert will be back after this post and will hopefully share how his thoughts have evolved over the last week or two.  Personally, I'm really looking forward to hearing them as this week has deepened a friendship that we started loosely two years ago. 

Anecdotally speaking, it appears that people enjoyed reading another perspective here on the scoblizer blog.  However, not everyone feels the same about guest blogging (not me personally, but the idea in general) and a conversation appears to be brewing.  It will be interesting where the town ends up on this from an etiquette and practice point of view. 

The guest blogging experience was fun, challenging and in the end personally very worthwhile.  Thank you to everyone who sent mail with links, thoughts on a post, or a kind words about this stint as a guest blogger.  Some things learned this week:

Blogging is a labor of love.  You have to be willing trade off other life things you could do to really engage and continue a conversation/perspective.  It is a tough balance and one that can easily take over other important things in your life.  The bigger the blog the harder it is to find the right balance. 

Blogging is a huge source of connections & re-connections.  My high school computer lab manager found me through scoble's blog.  We hadn't talked in many years and I'm looking forward to an upcoming lunch with him.  People on the SVC campus reached out to say hello which generated more friendships and information sharing in our little piece of Microsoft here in the valley.

Blogging is emotionally challenging.  Like anything where you share opinions, thoughts and feelings it is bound to generate responses.  Some will be the positive and some will be negative.  While a thick skin can help regulate the emotions you also learn to face your "stage fright" on a regular basis. 

Blogging creates great offline conversations.  The diversity and breadth of conversations you end up having outside of the public space of your blog is wonderful.  It is really fun to get more in touch with the people around you and nothing facilitates that like having something to talk about. 

These points may not be all that world shattering, but they were drilled into my noggin this week.  Sometimes no matter how much you read or think about something it doesn't become real until you live them. 

Finally, the measure of whether you really liked something is if you would do it again…and I most definitely would! In this case, I'll continue to blog over on spaces.  My goal is to post one of these story type entries once a week or so. 

Some links before I head off (mostly from the segment of the world I read regularly):

Oshoma Momoh has an interesting blog on technology, business and startups.

Toread.cc puts webpages you want to read in your inbox (via Trevin).

Heather posted about Onfolio (now a part of the Windows Live Toolbar) and how the product management team use it for research. 

Torres talks about some culture change he'd like to see at Microsoft. 

Fast OS switching on Mac Intels, a video.

Fil posted a screencasts from his Mix06 talk on XAML.

Jamie Buckely shares that search results for a holiday name now gives the upcoming dates…neat!

Looks like a new Vista build has been released to the public and Kristan is re already writing up tips and tricks!

Guy Kawasaki posted his top ten favorite books.  In other news, I added 9 new books to my reading list.

And last, but not least, the silicon valley campus turned on the largest bay area solar power installation on earthday.  The official press release has all sorts of great info about the environmentally friendly nature of the SVC campus. 

Robert, thanks for the trust, support, and opportunity! 

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…