When someone leaves a company, it's not normally big news. But when a Chief Evangelist
leaves the company he's passionate about--thus the role "evangelist," then yeah, there's a story here. Scoble is not Microsoft's designated Chief Evangelist, but Googling
"Microsoft Chief Evangelist" tells the tale.
Microsoft comes out the loser here, no question.
Doc Searls wrote how Microsoft, in its Industrial Age approach to HR metrics, was incapable of figuring the worth of a worker like Scoble. How true.
Kent Newsome was also correct when he said that Scoble's leaving will probably result in Microsoft becoming less relevant in the blogosphere.
Steve Newsome (no relation to Kent) said that he was not embarrassed to say that Scoble is one of the few people who have genuinely inspired him. I'm not embarrassed to say that I agree with him.
Dave Winer wrote of the change he's seen in his friend Scoble since joining Microsoft, "you can only be at such a large company for so long before it changes you." That's certainly true, but it consistently amazed me how Scoble seemed to be master of his own words.
As Eric Auchard said, quoted in
a Dan Farber post, "Scoble came to personify a new style of corporate honesty in which he publicly spoke his mind on controversial topics. He was often willing to judiciously criticize Microsoft or praise its most fierce competitors."
Who's going to replace Scoble at Microsoft? No one can replace Scoble. End of story.
Niall Kennedy? I'm sorry, you don't just replace Scoble by adding some other guy's feed to your aggregator. I saw links to Niall Kennedy as the next designated Microsoft Geek Blogger, who I'm sure is a smart and great guy, but I've never heard of him. One thing I've learned about blogging is that you must create your own audience, build your own readership, based on your own expertise and experience, and with your own voice, before you can ever speak for someone like Scoble came to speak for Microsoft. No one will ever replace the value that Scoble brought to Microsoft.
As for
PodTech, I stopped subscribing to it months ago.
I blogged
on Podtech podcasts I thought were valuable in the past, but the content became too
plastic for me, too much about the money and not the technology, and even less about the
people behind that technology. I always thought that Scoble was a much more effective blogger than a podcast or videocast host, but his
genuineness comes through regardless of the medium, which is always
going to be a draw. Am I going to re-subscribe to PodTech with the addition of
Scoble? Uh...yeah.
Lots of interesting words written on this amazingly compelling topic that I haven't gotten around to reading and which are yet to be written. There are many lessons in this story, but the greatest lesson to me is that the value of one individual's voice is potentially much greater than we can ever imagine.