Linkage: Microsoft and cool: so close yet so far :)

Source: The JobSyntax Blog : Microsoft and cool: so close yet so far :)

Anyway, I love the end of the article, in which Fred reveals that a Microsoft employee inadvertently emailed him PR's file on him, Wired, and Microsoft's talking points surrounding efforts like Channel 9 and On10. Love it. So classic Microsoft. Cringe, cringe, sigh...

While I'm on the topic of big-corp-culture I did find this amusing and it's something else I can totally see happening. The issue to me is that there is still a perception gap between blogging and getting an article in wired. We blog freely, but if Fred from wired contacted me I'd have to get a few levels of approval to talk to him.  But if he asks questions on my blog it seems like fair game. :-)  When the only difference I see is the level of exclusivity granted. 

If Fred asks questions on my blog and I answer publicly there isn't much to gain for wired compared to a private phone call.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2007
  Seems to me that one major difference between the blog q&a and the phone call is that the risk of being misquoted or taken out of context is greatly reduced in the blog version. With a phone call, there's much more potential for you to be selectively quoted in a way that's then hard to correct or refute. But, alas, I doubt that's the real reason for the difference. It probably is simply the PR equivalent of a prehensile tail.

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  That's one potential concern, but the same approval process would be followed if they wanted to e-mail me questions from wired and I wrote back to them privetly.   And having been taken out of context and actually mis-quoted from my blog seems to happen frequently despite the safegaurds that you would think the factual transparency would provide.