Scoble Bites The Hand That Fed Him

An anonymous reader writes "The Times Online points out a post that Robert Scoble, former Microsoft blogger, put up on his site recently. In essence, Scoble has moved 180 degrees from his former blogging tone, saying that 'Microsoft Sucks'. More specifically, he is highly critical of Microsoft's online policy. In Scoble's words: 'Microsoft's Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks (look at that last post again). If that's in it to win then I don't get it. ... Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the Internet? Come on. This isn't winning. Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative (where's the video RSS reader? Blog search? Something like Yahoo's Pipes? A real blog service? A way to look up people?) That's how you win.'"

Re:Who does microsoft execs listen to?

[Savage-Rabbit]

When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?

Monkeys on typewriters?

Traditionally Microsoft hasn't asked anybody when their products weren't doing well. They simply set about either making life so difficult for any competitor and users of his products that the competitor's market share dwindled down to almost nothing or they simply eliminated the competition altogether which forced the consumers to buy Microsoft products. Whenever they couldn't do either of those two things their products often fail. Microsoft products comparatively rarely seem to enjoy huge success on their own merits. I'll admit that despite all the hullablaloo about the demise of Netscape IE was a better browser than Netscape 4.x. Not that IE was anything to cheer over, somewhere between versions 3 and 4 it simply began to suck less than Netscape did. Of course nowadays IE is pretty much beaten by Firefox and Safari (at least IMHO). The MS Office pack is also a fairly good product, after c.a. Office 97 or so it actually became usable for something more than writing letters and short essays!! Their OS and Server products, however, have generally either sucked or been uninspiring at best and their databases are nothing special. It remains to be seen how they do on the Mobile Phone market with their Windows Mobile where they compete against Mobile Phone OS products like Symbian and Linux, and the digital Music/Media market where they are up against the iPod. MS seems to be doing fairly well on the game console market although they haven't exactly succeeded in assimilating it completely into their collective.

Best said from the outside

[MichaelSmith]

Its the kind of thing people promise themselves and their co-workers they are going to say after they leave. Its good for the people still there, and its good in the long term for any stock you own in your previous employer.

Yes, he is bad mouthing them, but its not like he is posting their private bug database on bittorrent. And Microsoft might be better for it.

Aw poor Scoble

[Timesprout]

Looks like he's spitting the dummy now that he is out of the loop. MS are not a search company, MS dont want to be a search company but as is the way when you are a perceived are the dominant IT player you must be seen to 'compete' with all the 'upstarts' to keep the share holders happy, so your business heads gob off about how stupid the opposition business heads are. I think most people are going to be very surprised when they realise where MS see their future and while they are currently getting slaughtered in many sections of the press over Vista they are quietly laying the ground work for the next phase, which is largely why there has been so little reaction from Redmond to the adverse press.

Its too late

[el_jake]

MS time to market sucks. They are too late, they slept during the bigest internet ekspansion. Its all invented. There last option is to buy there competitors or change focus to operating system development. Even VISTA is late and feels not as smooth as OS X.
There only advantage is the huge amount of customer base, who are using there current platform. I think its over. The MS ship is going down, slowly.

Re:I don't think they can

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft have been taking the Internet seriously since before Google left Stanford University.

Have they? I havn't seen much fabled "innovation" coming from Microsoft on the internet. They only take it seriously where it could threaten their traditional revenue streams, not because they have any interesting or innovative ideas that could make the internet a better place. The internet threatened to be an open network that anyone could play on, Microsoft tried to get people to use MSN instead. Netscape threatened to make the web, a killer application, platform-neutral: Microsoft made sure they killed it with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Standard compliant email servers threatened to make email platform neutral; Microsoft push Exchange and Outlook with gratuitous incompatibilities and a lack of open standards. When Google were just a search engine Microsoft let them be; when Google started to become an on-line application provider, Microsoft suddenly begin to roll out technology to counter the threat to their Office and Windows revenue. Let's not forget the whole early ".NET will revolutionise the entire internet once we work out what it is!" marketing circus that amounted to nothing.

Microsoft talk big, deliver little and focus all their energy on crushing any threat to their income streams.

In there to 'win'?

[WaZiX]

That's the problem with Microsoft, they are so obsessed with winning that they forgot that in the end, they are a service company, and in a service company you serve your customers, not yourself! Stop wanting to take over existing markets on the Internet and start creating yourselves new Internet markets. About any Internet company I think of that has been successful has brought a new experience to it's customers: eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Youtube, ... they all had a compelling reason for customers to use their service.

On Internet you need 2 things to be successful, and Idea and money for development/marketing. They definitely have the money, all they need is NEW ideas to use their money on.

Re:Aw poor Scoble

[pionzypher]

Are [earthtimes.org] you [pcadvisor.co.uk] sure [arstechnica.com] about [msn.com] that?

Seriously, MS still envies google in that area. For all the hot air Ballmer spews about googles' "cute" apps, and how their hire rate is "insane".... MS has lost this round of the search match, they're not able to compete. Look at the emphasis they've put on it. Why pay people to use windows live if you don't care? Microsoft is becoming the one thing that Bill Gates hoped he'd never see.... a lumbering behemoth not dissimilar to the old IBM. They are having diffifulty keeping up with the present, just look at vista for connfirmation. (Disclaimer: I don't mind vista).

But vista brings forth features that I've had in linux for years. gkrellm does a great job as a sidebar, without the resource usage. The latter part of... scratch that.... MOST OF XP's cycle was spent chasing holes and vulnerabilities.

I like vista, and see it being fairly well adoped in a few years time. But it's not a forward looking technology, just as Live Search isn't forward looking. They care, but there isn't much they can do about it besides pay people to use it.

Re:No one can describe it

[WaZiX]

Yeah, they should set for one name and develop that, I guess they wanted to tie their web apps more to their desktop apps to give a sense of familiarity... But the worse part is even when they try to completely change their services, they still can't do it right.

Just look at their email. I have windows vista on another partition (for specialized programs that don't run on linux), well, it comes with Windows Mail. They changed their MSN/Hotmail service and you can download your mails on your desktop, great! So it's simple right, just use their new mail product to connect to the hotmail server... well NO! See their new Mail program is not 'Live' branded, so you need to download another Windows Mail, namely Windows Live Mail Desktop to use your hotmail on your desktop. And that new program logs in _before_ you can see your programs. How many mail apps do I need? And why do I have to sign in on MSN to read my other mail accounts?

And once you have installed Windows Live Mail Desktop, well it sets itself as the default program for reading your mails through windows live messenger. Worse part, it doesn't even work well with windows live messenger, since you usually have to delete mails in order for the number of mail notifications to be updated correctly!

All this money invested in locking customers into their live branded parts, such a waste! Instead of pouring money in 2 different programs, pour twice as much money in 1 and just set hotmail to work with pop/imap. Right now Microsoft has 3 completely independent email clients, 3! And none have actually been developed together, how stupid is this?

Re:Aw poor Scoble

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft know that Vista is unspectacular, the licensing revenue will keep them in business until they crap out lungburn. They're quite prepared for Vista to get a cold reception if the marketing blitz for their next release will have more impact. I don't buy that what we see in Microsoft is a company that has gradually lost sight of what its customers actually want; they've always been adversarial. Additionally, Microsoft have held back development of key technologies a decade or more, kill competition and you kill the incentive for innovation.

What we are seeing now is a widespread understanding that it is advantageous for everyone that Microsoft be restrained. We are fortunate that competing products have been slipping through the cracks in Microsoft's armor. These products and Microsoft's lackluster offerings make a stronger case against Microsoft than zealotry and criticism ever did.

Re:There is not bad PR...?

[bateleur]

You'd better give us some more about how much better Ubuntu is comparing to SuSe

That's an interesting thing about Microsoft and Google, though, isn't it? After years of Microsoft-vs-Linux and occasional Microsoft-vs-Apple a lot of the geek tribal mindshare now seems to have shifted across to cheering for Google.

I consider myself a Linux fanboi in general, but the more time passes the more I find myself losing interest in OS wars and caring more about applications. Quite frequently I boot my desktop machine into Windows XP and spend the day mostly running Firefox, emacs and Cygwin because it's easier that way than trying to run the occasional Windows-only app on Debian (via Wine or whatever).

So if it's all about applications now it becomes clearer why Google are so popular. Search, mail, maps, documents... a lot of their stuff seems well designed and easy to use. Oh, plus it's cleverly funded so I don't pay anything. Compare with MS Office which is expensive, bloated and often hard to use.

Re:Dunno about trap

[mgblst]

This sort of thing has been going on for many years. A lot of people to place more trust in an organisation who will admit their errors, but the majority perfer to live blind. That is, they will trust a company that doesn't admit any error, in the blind faith belief that they must have never committed any errors. To think overwise is to admit that companies are human (or at least made of humans), and most people would prefer to not admit that. So it can backfire.

Also, as a pessimist, you end up with companies admitting some small errors, but not the major ones.

Re:I don't think they can

[kripkenstein]

Fact is, Microsoft's business plan has never been "build a better OS/office suite/mousetrap". It's been "build one that's good enough and market it as being better".

More recently, they added the "do everything to maintain the Windows monopoly" strategy. This is in fact why Microsoft cannot "Ship [...] a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe", as Scoble would suggest they do. Cross-platform? Never.

Cross-platform tools are always created by Microsoft's competitors, not Microsoft. Java is cross-platform, .Net isn't (despite even Mono). Firefox is cross-platform, IE isn't. And so on and so forth.

Scoble suggesting Microsoft do something 'cross-platform' is a sign of ignorance, I would say.

Re:Who does microsoft execs listen to?

[Technician]

When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?

I have heard some read Slashdot. If they do, I can toss out a suggestion.. Don't sell the boxed version at an order of magnitude more than the OEM version. My older hardware has been getting upgrades to Linux because the upgrade cycle does not make sense for the software. A $650 PC should not need a Multi-Hundred dollar copy of XP Pro and $400 copy of Office.

After being given a Power Point presentation to show for a guest speaker, the Office 2000 on the Windows 2000 laptop presented the text a page at a time instead of a bullet at a time. Instead of spending lots of money for a software upgrade, I tried the same presentation on the same laptop running Ubuntu with Open Office. It worked like a charm. If MS Office was a $40 upgrade, I may have considered it. Due to the many versions, Professional, Small Office, Standard, & Home and Student, I figured a full upgrade was too expensive when an alternative works fine.

Wake up and smell the coffee. You have new neighbors and they are setting up shop in your back yard. Monopoly pricing and high priced retail versions are on their way to a dead end.

Just for the record, 3 of my older PC's now have Ubuntu. I only get a new version of a MS OS on new hardware. There is no reason to spend big bucks on a software upgrade.

MS should focus on core

[halliburton]

MS should focus on its core competency, which is hardware.
Drop all these other side projects like the search engine, the news site, the OS..
Go back to making great mice, keyboards and joysticks.
They used to be the best, and now that they are sidetracked with all these other projects they are losing focus, and it's starting to show.

Re:All you need to know is

[outcast36]

MSDN too. If you are a MS developer, just add "site:msdn.microsoft.com" to your google search. Hurray!!!

Re:Its too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighten up. English is obviously not this person's native language.

Re:Wanna trade?

[intangible]

You'd take a guy who follows a crazed lunatic over the lunatic? I wonder which is crazier.