Adam Bosworth says he’s scared of posting on his blog. “I find that most of what I want to post these days would rile a fair number of people and then Google would get the blame …
even though these are my personal opinions, so I chose to keep my thoughts to myself.”
It’s funny. Yesterday I spoke to a bunch of CTO’s and other executives and VCs. You could smell the fear in the room. They were afraid of blogging and bloggers. They were afraid of something new that they didn’t yet understand.
Hey, you guys at Google are in the drivers’ seat now. You have the world’s attention, and you have great technologists like yourself and MarkL. You want to change the world, right? Well, guess what? When you change the world you’ll piss people off. People don’t like change. They don’t like being forced to learn something new.
You think this is easy? Yeah, right. When I came to Microsoft I had a goal of getting us to support RSS.
In every post about RSS over the past three years I had a goal: get Microsoft to use/support/integrate RSS.
You think I didn’t piss people off when I said “you should be fired if you don’t use RSS?” Go ask Lenn Pryor what kind of email he got. He works at Skype now so he’ll tell you the truth.
Statements like that piss people off.
But, on the other hand, today on the Microsoft RSS scorecard we have Sharepoint 12, Outook 12, CRM, Start.com, Windows Vista, and many others. It’s not due to my work, either, I was just the cheerleader for other people who were doing the hard work. But good ideas, like good teams, need cheerleaders. Bosworth, if your ideas are great, put them out here and let us poke at them! If they really are great, they’ll withstand any challenge. In fact, I believe a great idea is like El Capitan. The more you poke at it, the more it stands out as a great idea.
Changing the world is messy work. It’s not for those who fear getting fired or fear getting their companies a bit of bad PR or who fear the opinions of billionaires.
It’s time for this industry to shed its fear and show some leadership. Please do piss us off. It’s good for us.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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