December 20, 2004
blogs will be to microsoft what the ipod is to macintosh
Blogs will be to Microsoft what the iPod is to Macintosh. You heard it here first.
Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the gambit:
Forget Lovemarks. If you want to see the future of marketing, just read Robert Scoble, and specifically his latest Open Letter to Bill Gates. (For those who’ve not come across him, Scoble is a blogger who went to work for Microsoft on the marketing side.)
[PS:] Earlier post by me on the very same subject here.
[PPS:] Why I prefer Windows to Macintosh (besides the obvious “It’s REALLY good for traffic!”).
[PPPS:] “Personality Feudalism”. Why Apple is basically annoying.
Couldn’t agree less. (Unless I’ve missed the point, there’s a fair chance that that’s what’s happened.) Blogging is almost the antithesis of what Microsoft stands for. Blogging is all about ease of use, minimal features, open access, non-proprietariness. It’s the most basic way of communicating. M$ is all about making communication proprietary, about feature bloat, and copyright, about control. Just because you’ve stumbled on one Microserf blogger doesn’t make the whole enterprise hip, happening or in touch with the consumer. Just as the iPod doesn’t make Apple the best tech company (or even marketing business) in the world. Judge these companies by their products and their decisions, please, not by their marketing or “their” blogging.
Point taken, Richard.
Still, anybody who’s even skimmed through Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” will know that the Roman Empire was ultimately defeated from within, from its own weight, and not from the barbarian enemies beyond its borders.
Microsoft is in the same position at Rome was in 300 – 400 A.D. i.e. big and ready to topple.
So the question is, will it/can it re-invent itself, or will it, like Rome, topple?
Anybody?
Interesting
Richard: agree with you there. But then, look at Halo 2. It came out of here too and they had people around the world waiting in lines at midnight (I know, I stood in line with 300 people in Silicon Valley).
Or, look at the number of MSN Spaces blogs. More blogs were created in about a week there than had been created in the first five years of the blogosphere’s existence.
Can we turn this aircraft carrier around? I don’t know, but I’m having fun trying!
Interestingly, you both take different views starting at the same point. A collapsing empire or an aircraft carrier in search of a handbrake turn are both behemothic (mmm, neologism?). Open source trends (I include blogging in that — it’s open source publishing) can’t actually rescue them. Indeed, I propose a different analogy to either of you. Open sourec software and blogging are the small mammals to M$‘s and big publishing’s dinosaurs. Even without the meteorite, the big lizards are doomed. I work for a small publishing company, and the big question I’m trying to answer is one posed by Hugh and others a while back: how do you cope when bundled content is dead? What do those of use whose revenue model is bundled content and intermediation do five years from now when a generation of media consumers is used to creating their own bundles? M$ has the same question to answer: when software development doesn’t rely on big gangs of coders and creators and distributors and consultants — on overhead, basically — what then?
Richard, good point. What you have illustrated is the often corrupting influence of taking your company public.
At least in the USA, private company can go, “The goalposts have moved. Screw it. Move on. Build a new biz model which relies on 2,000 people, not 60,000. Have it up n’ running by next Christmas”.
Because a public company is ALWAYS beholden to Wall Street, it cannot do that. It can only do stuff which is good for the next Quarter.
What is good for the business is not always good for Wall Street, and vice versa.
If MS does have a meteor, methinks it’s the same meteor that once happily gave Bill Gates billions of dollars. The one that will insist MS remain a large, cold-blooded lizard, and forbid it to change into a small furry, mammal.