While I can never forget how much I love this company and all of the great things we do, I wanted a daily reminder of the fact that I, as a Microsoftie, need to change the world every single day. That is why, as part of MGX this year, I decided to fully embrace the Blue Monster and all it stands for. That is my very own Blue Monster tattoo (and yes, he is real!). He’s there to make sure I don’t forget why I am here and what it is that I am doing — changing the world.

The a couple of days ago the story breaks that Dan has just been laid off from Microsoft. The job is gone, the tattoo remains etc. As the song goes, “Isn’t it ironic”.
Dan talks about here:

One of the questions I have been hearing often involves my very first blog post on this site– “What about the Blue Monster?” The truth is, I haven’t regretted that tattoo since I got it and now is no exception. The Blue Monster is staying.
Working at Microsoft has been the greatest experience of my life and I have no desire to forget about it. And even if I don’t get back into Microsoft right away (which is, by the way, my plan!), then I have a reminder that even outside of Microsoft, I need to do my best to change the world every single day.

So being the cartoonist who spawned the Blue Monster, how do I feel about it?
Well, I don’t know Dan personally, but at the time I considered it a great honor that he would regard my work highly enough to tattoo himself with it, even if I would never be totally comfortable with that kind of responsibility. But I guess that’s the price you pay for putting your work out there. It’s like being a songwriter, and then reading in the national media that some teenager in Iowa killed himself while listening to your album. That doesn’t make you an accessory to murder. Art has a life of its own.
And yeah, getting laid off is always a risk, with or without a company tattoo to call your own. Welcome to reality.
Secondly, just because Dan doesn’t work for Microsoft Corp any more, doesn’t mean he’s no longer part of the grander cause he signed up for, for the kind of change he wants to help make. Microsoft is a huge company, but it’s dwarfed in comparison by the size of their Partner Group ecosystem. I imagine Dan could easily end up somewhere in there, working away quite happily and productively for the same cause.
And why not? I have a friend who was laid off from Microsoft last year, and guess what? She still drives to the Redmond campus every day. Only this time she’s the employee of an outside contractor, not Microsoft, but the type of work that she’s doing, and the people she’s working with inside Microsoft, really hasn’t changed too much. The lines that separate “internal” and “external” are very blurry, compared to even half a generation ago.
Thirdly, the Blue Monster was never about Dan’s paycheck. It was about an idea. I’ve been saying this for years: All a product is, all a company is, is an an “Idea Amplifier”. Products don’t excite us. Human potential excites us.
i.e. “People matter. Objects don’t.“
Good luck to you, Dan. Good luck with your next adventure, and good luck with your new blog. Rock. On. And Thanks!

Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory — it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.

Real drives, passions and beliefs. Exactly.
The Blue Monster line, “Change The World Or Go Home” is not rocket science or literary brilliance. It just articulates a simple belief, a simple passion, a simple drive THAT ALREADY EXISTED, long before The Blue Monster ever came on to the scene. That’s all it was ever meant to do.

[The Microsoft Blue Monster etc.]
Whether you agree or disagree with it doesn’t matter, the important bit is that people within Microsoft believe it. Unlike a conventional ad campaign, it’s not about you. It’s about them.
Why is something like this potentially valuable to a business? Simply put, if you believe something passionately enough, for long enough, articulate it well enough, and your actions are aligned, credible and consistent with your belief for long enough, it’s just a matter of time before other people start believing it, too. And next thing you know, you have an interesting conversation going on, both inside and outside the company. And as Doc Searls famously said, “Markets are conversations”. Ker-Chiing.
Again, none of this is rocket science. Talking to people never is.
When people ask me what exactly is a Blue Monster, I tell them, it’s not necessarily a cartoon. It’s simply a social object that allows one to more easily articulate the Purpose-Idea. No more, no less.
I’ve been asking myself for years, what comes after conventional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising, now that we live in a post-TV, post-advertising, post-message world? “Creating Blue Monsters” is the closest I’ve ever come to finding an actual answer.
Besides drawing the cartoons, helping other companies create Blue Monsters is how I intend to spend the remainder of my career.
Cartoons and Blue Monsters. I really do have the world’s greatest job. Rock on.
[More Blue Monster background reading here.]

A Sea Change in Computing
Some analysts say cloud computing represents a sea change in the way computing is done in corporations. Merrill Lynch (MER) estimates that within the next five years, the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion. In a May 2008 report, Merrill Lynch estimated that 12% of the worldwide software market would go to the cloud in that period.
Those vendors that can adjust their product lines to meet the needs of large cloud computing providers stand to profit. Companies like IBM, Dell (DELL), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), for instance, are moving aggressively in this direction. On Aug. 1, IBM said it would spend $360 million to build a cloud computing data center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., bringing to nine its total of cloud computing centers worldwide. Dell is also targeting this market. The computer marker supplies products to some of the largest cloud computing providers and Web 2.0 companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo (YHOO). “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers,” Dell CEO Michael Dell says.

I was also recently really surprised and delighted about all the discussion my last post, “The Cloud’s Best-Kept Secret”, seemed to generate. Not just the amount of discussion, but the quality of it, from some of the smartest people I know on the planet. People like Tim O’Reilly, JP Rangaswami, Dennis Howlett, James Governor, all piping in. Rock on.
And of course, there’s the “Cloud Portraits” I’ve been drawing recently. Clouds, clouds, clouds… Clouds everywhere. Like West Texas in the rainy season etc.
What does this all mean? Frankly, I have no idea. I have no intention of becoming a “Cloud Blogger” or whatever, I’m just start to feel a connection here. Connections are my lifeblood. One of my favorite cartoons ever exists simply because I saw a connection between ego, emotion and typography. In 2005 I was the first person to see a connection between $5K English suits and the blogosphere [which back then, I can tell you, A LOT of people thought that was a bit of a stretch]. In 2006 I saw a similar connection between a small South African wine brand and the geek community of Silicon Valley.
This year I’m feeling the same sort of connection between all of the work I’ve been doing in the last year. It’s hard to explain– it’s visceral; it’s like you can just smell it, even if it remains so far invisible. It’s just there. A feeling, not quite yet a fact. And a wee voice keeps telling me that The Cloud is at the center of it somehow. Wait and see.

[Bonus Link:] James also has a nice post on the subject, “Whose Cloud Is It, Anyway?”.
[UPDATE:] JP Rangaswami comments over on his blog, advocating Open Source as the antidote to Cloud Monopolies:

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.
Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.

[PS: That “Power Laws” link is highly, highly, highly recommended reading. Just so you know.]

While I can never forget how much I love this company and all of the great things we do, I wanted a daily reminder of the fact that I, as a Microsoftie, need to change the world every single day. That is why, as part of MGX this year, I decided to fully embrace the Blue Monster and all it stands for. That is my very own Blue Monster tattoo (and yes, he is real!). He’s there to make sure I don’t forget why I am here and what it is that I am doing — changing the world.

Wow. Thanks, Dan. As a cartoonist, it doesn’t get any better than this. Like Pam Slim just told me, “Yikes, Hugh, that brings ‘Putting Skin into The Branding Game’ to a whole new level!“
[Hint to Marketers:] The fact that one of your colleagues is willing to get a company tattoo, AGAIN, demonstrates a strong sense of what Mark Earls calls “The Purpose-Idea”. Think about it. Seriously.

I’d ask the team at Microsoft to ask some blunt questions about who they really are. I don’t mean the bullshit “mission statement” responses here either; I’m talking brutal honesty. From a peripheral standpoint, my nutshell response to this situation would be something like, “We’re the most powerful computing force on the planet, and we’re acting like a bunch of sissies.”

I find two lines in the last paragraph very telling:

Of course, none of this is going to happen. Microsoft is still a behemoth, and it’s not as though they are asking for my opinion.

And here, of course, is an opportunity for Microsoft to prove Eric wrong. Let’s see if anyone inside Redmond sends him an e-mail. This for me goes back to what JP Rangaswami said a wee while ago:

People want Microsoft to change. That is the essence of what made the Blue Monster such a hit, it was a way of people outside Microsoft telling people in Microsoft of the intense need for change…

The more I get to know Microsoft, the truer this seems to be, both inside and outside the company.
[Thanks to Leah for the pointer.]

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

The one thing that separates human beings from other mammals is our capacity for metaphor i.e. the capacity to tell stories. These forty-odd “wine experts” were telling themselves a wine story. The molecules in the bottle didn’t matter. What mattered was the narrative.
With hundreds and thousands of wine brands all telling the same story [“Our FAMILY has been making THIS kind of wine on THIS piece of LAND for THIS MANY generations yak ya yak…”] the only way we could get Stormhoek to rise above the clutter was to tell a different story altogether. Which in the end meant a rather unlikely cultural mash-up between a small South African vineyard and the US West Coast technology crowd, including Silicon Valley and Microsoft.
We’ve had some good results along the way, but the experiment is far from over yet…
[UPDATE] My Chicago friend, Vinny Warren left the following story in the comments below:

I worked in a bar in Ireland in my youth back in the 80s. There was a brewery sponsored inter-pub competition to see which bar could sell the most COLT 45 malt liquor which had just been introduced and was failing miserably. Malt Liquor in Ireland??
It was a very busy pub. So we switched the very popular Heineken taps over to the Colt 45 kegs towards closing time each night for a month.
We won the competition. The prize was a free trip to Spain.
And not a single punter ever complained about the taste of their Heineken!

It changed me if not Microsoft. It defines Hugh’s Social Object concept. It defines much of how I think about Microsoft and has been the driving force in my desire to change perceptions that have built up over the years. Microsoft isn’t perfect, but we’re far from the evil that it’s become all to easy to portray. Microsoft is made up of smart, passionate, funny and genuine people. I think Blue Monster has done a pretty good job of helping expose that, amongst other things. One year on I feel very good about that.

Rock on, Clayton.
[Update:] James Moody talks about how the Blue Monster affects his business:

I, myself, carry Blue Monster business cards from Street Cards and that has led to some interesting conversations with clients and prospective clients. Having the conversation has definitely led to more project closings (the good kind of closing) for me than not. The little guy has led more of my meetings into a “what do you think about this” type, than the “here’s what I can do, this is how much it will cost” type, which lets me connect more on a personal level with prospective clients. Once most people see how passionate I am about the software I’m recommending, it changes perceptions of the “big bad bully” on the block.

What’s important is that a lone blogger with a good idea was able to get a huge company to listen to him and to adopt one of his fairly radical ideas. It shows that social media is a viable force for change, for marketing, and for the new media than a lot of big companies may now finally begin to take seriously.

7. When thinking about applying social media to companies, “What social media tools should we use” should not be the first question. “How do we wish to talk to people differently” should be the first question. If you don’t have an answer to this, quit your job and go find something else.
8. None of this stuff is rocket science. Most of it is glaringly obvious. And sadly for folks working in the social software industry, “The people who get it, don’t need us. And the people who need us, don’t get it.” Which is why being a “blog consultant” or whatever is a lot less lucrative and rewarding than people often think.
9. I recently received the following e-mail:

Hugh,
As much as I like the Blue Monster, does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? I mean, we both know that no matter how big the Blue Monster gets, Microsoft is still going to continue being “evil”, and its software is still going to continue to suck. And no blogging cartoonist is ever going to change that.
Any thoughts?
Dave

Well, Dave, your low opinion of Microsoft notwithstanding, I’m not looking at this from the executive level. I’m coming at this from the perspective of a small-time cartoonist with a blog and an internet connection. And from where I’m standing, it seems to me that in a big company like Microsoft, even a small thing like the Blue Monster can create a lot of value for a lot of people. Not getting too carried away in the Expectation Department is what will keep things interesting.
10. No, I have no idea of where all this is going. All I care about these days is drawing cartoons, doing interesting things with interesting people, paying my bills, and keeping my sorry ass out of the hospital, the mental asylum, the morgue etc.

So what’s the good news you may well be asking?
Well, Microsoft may be about to radically step up their aspirations in the world of advertising, but they have decided to play nice. They think that they their best chance of slicing off a large piece of the advertising pie — and preventing the whole market being run by Google — is to co-operate with the advertising industry not try and vaporise it. Ballmer and co have decided they need the people who understand the more subjective part of the marketing equation, otherwise known as branding, which even the most powerful algorithms can’t get their processors around. Yet.

[Just added this post to the Blue Monster series.]