Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Hanging with Scoble at Microsoft Campus

November 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Hanging with Scoble at Microsoft Campus

TAGS: Microsoft

I spent most of the day down at the Under the Radar event, hosted at the MS campus down in Mountain View. I feared holy water and cries of "Infidel" but my open source leanings were hidden underneath my Butterfly suit.

Before I actually headed into the company demos I was fortunate to spend an hour with Robert Scoble, who is single-handedly taking on the MS establishment and trying to shake the place up. If you don't already read the Scobelizer blog, you should. Not only is he a good writer (and typer ~100 wpm) he may actually have the most relevant observations of anyone in the tech industry. We talked a lot about Google, Web 2.0 companies and the fact that MS is so big they have had a hard time seeing the forest through the trees, while Google continues to build the forest around them.

Scoble contends-and I largely agree, that any startup that draws an audience that would look at advertising along side content could simply be feeders for Google, Yahoo or MS who are battling it out. I need someone to give me a stupid idea to build and sell to those three. Some kind of mash-up/map/podcast/ROI tool perhaps.

My biggest realization from our conversation is that I tend to think of MS as one giant company when really it's like 100 small companies all trying to be relevant-hence the market confusion and multiple personalities. That also speaks to the seemingly random announcements and focus, one minute it's Windows Live, then it's supercomputing-Scoble pointed out that there are so many projects going on that its difficult to manage the communications, which I agree with, but still they could do a better job with.

We also hung out with Rajesh Setty who just published a book called Beyond Code all about how developers need to become more socialized in order to move beyond just being part of a team. Then Stan Murawski from the MS Mainframe Group told me that he is trying to figure out a communitized tool set for users migrating from mainframes to Windows server system-he even laughed when I called B.S. on his attempts to give me the Microsoft party line. It was really interesting talking with those guys. I feel like it's gotten harder to have those conversations mostly because the conferences I tend to go to are all open source oriented.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on November 16, 2005 06:47 PM

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