I'm still catching up on my feeds after essentially three weeks offline. I was offline the first week for a
Pennsylvania road trip, the second week I was in transition to start work for Telligent, and the third week I was actually working for Telligent. Okay, I wasn't really offline those last two weeks, but life in the Telligent domain put the squeeze to my leisurely reading habits.
Back to Scoble. The thing I was left with after catching up on his 84 posts since I last checked in 3 weeks ago is what a phenomenal blogger Scoble is by many different measures. He's prolific, controversial, honest, disarming, generates insightful comments from his readers, and is altogether human, as his most recently posted accounts of his mother show us.
I only now was able to read the April 24th manifesto that he wrote while on vacation titled "
How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft." An executive group of Microsoft movers and shakers needs to lock themselves in a room with this post and its 159 comments and promise to do some things different. They'll have to order in lunch, cause the meeting will take awhile. Scoble's essential point in the post was to make Microsoft so great that Mini would have nothing to write about, and he laid down some mandates on how they might do that.
1) First, we need a big dream. A moonshot. The kind of challenge that'll keep our newly-hired rock stars minds engaged...What's the moonshot? A guaranteed Terabyte of Internet-based storage space for EVERYTHING and for EVERYONE running Windows in the world.
2) Buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell machine with dual monitors running Windows Vista. And do it now.
3) Change employee behavior through public compensation change logs.
4) Get rid of corporate speed bumps.
5) Force marketers to explain their decisions — in public on their blogs.
What's so great about Scoble's blog is that he'll have an idea, put it out there, and readers will say, "Hold on, bud. This is a retarded notion and here's why." I read the entire gargantuan post and got to comment 37 (some of the comments were quite detailed, too) when I had to call it a day. Some of Scoble's mandates I agreed with, some not, but the important thing isn't how I feel about them but the ideas and conversation they generated from the community.
Then the sad side of humanity appears in Scoble's blog when his mother experiences heart failure and catastrophic stroke. Without being exploitive or overly dramatic, Scoble takes us along on his journey to his mother's home in Livingston, Montana, providing us with pictures and reflections along the way. The "
Bad News Gets Worse" post where he included a picture of him (or perhaps one of his brothers) holding his mother's hand was both touching and beautiful. He concluded with, "How do you say goodbye? One hand squeeze at a time."
So not only does Scoble make us think about the core issues that need addressing inside of one of the world's biggest and greatest companies, he makes us think about core issues in our lives outside of Microsoft, as well.
We're with you, Robert.
[tags: Robert Scoble, Microsoft]