Have I outlived my usefulness?

by on January 3, 2006

Heheh, Shel Israel and David Tebbutt are arguing over whether I should stay at Microsoft and whether Microsoft is trying to get rid of me by letting me go to geek dinners and such. I think the hype about me is just over the top.

You still don’t get it. Something changed over the last five years. What? Everyone has a voice. More important stuff on an associated topic on the next post.

  • "David thinks that perhaps Microsoft is intentionally showing him how sweet it could be for him on the outside rather than on the inside."

    I figure that one of your functions is going back and forth between the in and the outside, perhaps being a customer when talking to Microsoft and a Microsoft employee when at the outside. Although there's probably something of both at any time.
    All in all the arguments put forward seem reasons to keep on doing what you do.
  • I think you'll find I'm David Tebbutt. :-) Happy new year.
  • Fixed that, sorry about that David!
  • Thanks.
  • Do two posts constitue an argument?
  • Anona
    I'm willing to eat my hat if you are still doing what you do at MSFT come March 2007.
  • Mujibur
    A great response by MarkL to Scoble on his usefulness. Quoted from Mini-Microsoft in response to Scoble's rant about Mark.

    "Any finally Robert, Sorry about the mess I left behind, thanks for cleaning up after me. It was my idea to flip off the united states of america by giving them a version of windows that wouldn't boot, by telling the attorney general to go to hell, and by manufacturing phony demos. And yes, it was my idea to put our customers on a 3 year subscription cycle knowing that there was no way in the world that we would ever deliver them updates within their subscription window. Oh yeah, it was also my idea to crush all competition in the browser market and then once we won the war stop working on ours. Oh yeah, Vista is my fault too. Bill and Steve wanted to ship it 18 months after XP. I convinced them that an OS every five years is more than enough. Sorry, forgot about stack ranking... Me and a few other guys thought it would be a fun to give huge options and bonus awards to 1/3, give a cost of living adjustment to another 1/3, and then screw the bottom 1/3 with no raise or bonus. But agin Robert thanks for stepping up and offering to clean up this mess. I am sure that your non stop blogging (hey, how come your blog isn't on msn spaces?) is exactly the right way to fix this stuff. Shoot, if I knew you while at Microsoft, I would have voted you in as a partner and awarded you a 200,000 share restricted stock award. After all, as a partner, your contributions are certainly worth a cool $5mil right?

    And just one small correction in your post. I was not a manager at Microsoft and I am not a manager at Google. No one has to kill themselves to get my respect. They just have to be smart and creative, willing to work the entire software stack from metal thur ui, and finally, do what they say their gonna do and do it in the timeframe they say their gonna do it in.
  • Simo
    Judging by your next post (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/01/03/micr...) I'd say no you haven't.
  • Greetings,
    Heh... I talked to a Microsoftie just this weekend who said there are folks in MS who LOVE you, and ones who HATE you, and often for the same reasons. As long as there are still people who hate you (and/or what you say) in Microsoft, your work is not yet done.

    It is when you have no more enemies that you are no longer relevant to the company, and should move on to greener pastures. This is with respect to the blogging work you do; the C9 stuff would be still interesting, I imagine.

    -- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!
  • Christopher Coulter
    Without Microsoft, you'd just be another preening A-List blogger, easier to ignore, well unless went to Google (tho can't blog there). With Microsoft you are the blog-face-of-said-company. Either way, smart people would be wise to ignore, it doesn't change things, strategically, as it's all marketing talk, just now with 'blog' and 'rss', 'wiki' and 'shaky bad audio cam' as verbs.
  • Ricky
    Chris, yes. ok, your right, of course, Scoble is marketing.

    But isn't such a claim a "reductio ad absurdum"?

    What would Scoble have to do or say for it not to be marketing?

    If Scoble could do or say nothing which one could not claim in some broad sense was marketing, then to claim that what he is saying is marketing, is to under-determine the content of any predicate of Scoble, i.e., it is to say nothing about him.

    Thus to say that one should ignore Scoble's 'marketing talk', is to say that you should ignore nothing about Scoble.

    A piece of advice which the attention bunny would applaud.
  • Ricky: I only type on a keyboard. Is that worth paying attention to? ;-)
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