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by Randy Holloway.
Original Post: Dinner with Scoble
Feed Title: Randy Holloway's Weblog
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Feed Description: Commentary on Yukon, the CLR, and related technologies interspersed with personal opinion.
I finally had a chance to meet Scoble in person. He and I have IM'ed and have talked on the phone before, but it is always more fun to meet face to face. We talked about a number of things including market opportunities in the technology arena, the impact of weblogs on businesses, and recent events like Foo Camp. We also talked about some of the big issues facing technology companies like Microsoft, including the capacity for businesses to manage increasing volumes of data, reports, and other information sources, the use of price information to make markets more efficient and how technology can make businesses more effective in their markets, and the barriers to innovation in an established company. On the last point, one of the things Robert and I touched on was the problem with marketing in our industry. Right now, Microsoft has two faces. One is that of the product development people, who are blogging and reaching out to their customers and the communities they are a part of. This interaction is having a positive impact for Microsoft, with more and more developers looking at .NET as their platform of choice and actively engaging in a community effort to make the platform better. In the development community, Microsoft is seen in a better light than it has been in recent years. Another face of Microsoft is its marketing machine. There is a sterile feel to much of the marketing that Microsoft does. I think it comes down to an attempt to control the message. The more you try to control the message, the less effective the message will be. The reason is that people today can tell the difference between valuable information and canned marketing material. For a message to really have an impact, a centralized messenger controlling the message is inefficient and carries little weight. This is why weblogs and sites supporting syndication are gaining support when compared to standard web sites. People want to have access to the information that they want along with the ability to cut out or ignore extraneous elements. The lesson for marketers is this. Craft a concise message with compelling information, put it out in the market, and let people control the information flow.
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