In the aftermath of the Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates memos and emails I am seeing a few trends in the reaction.
Five blogs in particular got my attention:
1) Steve Gillmor’s Don’t Mention It
2) Joshua Porter’s Why Should I Trust Microsoft with My Attention Metadata?
3) Dion Hinchcliffe’s Microsoft Gets Disrupted
4) Stowe Boyd’s Scoble on Google
5) Om Malik’s The Bill and Ozzie Show
First let’s talk about Gillmor’s post. It made me laugh out loud. The “Top Ten Reasons why Dave Winer doesn’t pay attention to attention,” in particular was pretty funny. It’s my favorite post Steve’s done in a while. Mostly cause I’m friends with both Steve and Dave and it takes potshots at me too. Ahh, if you can’t laugh at yourself then there’s probably something wrong.
But, onto the meat. Joshua Porter asks why should he trust Microsoft? Wrong question: I wouldn’t trust anyone. And, it’s exactly why I’m pushing Microsoft to be more open with ALL of its formats and data. The new world is a mashup world. Mashers won’t play with APIs or formats that have limits. And they won’t play with APIs or formats they don’t trust. Joshua shows we have a LOT of work to do to gain even a basic level of trust. I think we can do it. But it’ll require doing things differently. It requires a new level of transparency and openness. It also requires doing services that you give away for free (and that you don’t try to monetize at every damn opportunity).
Along these lines, Dion has a nice chart that shows the disruption underway. Interesting analysis too. Yes, Dion, the stakes are indeed high. But, that’s not a good way to look at this. Disrupters never look at the stakes. They look at what’s fun to do. Steve Wozniak told me he didn’t build his Apple II to disrupt industries. He did it cause it’s fun and cause he wanted one!
Why did I like Memeorandum so much? Cause I wanted something that’d read through all my feeds and tell me what is important. Gabe built Memeorandum for me. That’s disruptive.
Both Om and Stowe think that Microsoft won’t be able to get its act together. That it won’t be able to morph and “get” the new services world.
Maybe not, but see this is where I have some perspective. I have seen this kind of reaction about companies before. And about Microsoft before. I remember when, in 2001-2003 people said Apple was dead. The stock price was at 12. I didn’t think that. I bought about $1,000 worth at 12 (and sold it shortly after I joined Microsoft at 22 – wish I had held that!)
I see tons of people who all believe in this services world and are just waiting to ship interesting stuff. Not only that, but I look at the research division we have here. There’s a treasure trove there waiting to be delivered as great products and services. And then I look at the cash we have. Oh, the cash! There are many Silicon Valley businesses springing up salivating at the idea that Microsoft would get into the acquisition business in a big way (and that Google would too).
And, new things pop out all the time that are damn interesting. Root.net just got turned on. It’s an amazing attention engine. I’m definitely going to trust that with my attention! Joshua talks all about that.
One last thing: Joshua, don’t trust us unless we make it win-win for you to do so. If we don’t, shame on us for not listening!
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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