Dylan Greene dot com

As I alluded to in an earlier blog entry, I finally got a chance to meet Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble last Friday. Scoble is known outside Microsoft as the great welcome human voice that Microsoft has never really had. Scoble is downright honest in his blog, complaining about the same things we users complain about and writing about non-Microsoft things that Microsoft seems to often miss or ignore. Hopefully he has the power to make some important changes within Microsoft, or at least the clout and balls to get things moving.

I've talked with Scoble a few times on messenger and he's linked to my blog entries a bunch of time times. I've always considered it an honor when he links to something I've written, so it was especially cool to get to meet him in person.

Scoble blogged my visit days well before I got around to writing this.

Some of the many things Scoble and I talked about:

1. The perception of Microsoft as a trustworthy company, versus a company like Apple or AOL.
2. The expectation from users that software should be easier to use today than 10 years ago or even last year.
3. Microsoft's lack of using good products for helping with the PR problem.
4. My belief that Longhorn should take away user interface flexibility for programmers and instead focus on funneling developers into a paradigm where they can only create usable applications.

Some interesting things I picked up while at Microsoft:

• None of my friends there blog.
• None of them had heard of Scoble. (!)
• None of them use RSS readers or read blogs with any frequency.
• None of them seemed to understand the draw of blogging.

Their reason for not blogging:

• "It would be boring to read about what I do all day."
• "I don't want to get in trouble for posting company confidential information."
• "There's no reason to blog in the intranet."
• "My blog would be no different than reading my progress reports off SharePoint."
• "It would take too much time."
• "There's already too many blogs out there."
• "RSS sucks as a standard. It needs better metadata."
• "What I write won't be helpful to anybody outside my team."

Interesting. My friends are from groups such as Avalon, MSN, SharePoint, and Security, all of which I think would have really interesting blogs.

Small world:

• Scoble and I were in ClubIE and and ClubWin
• Scoble remembers visiting my Windows 95 site (The Windows 95 Starting Pages)
• From Scoble's blog entry about my visit:

Funny, after I dropped him off in the lobby of my building, someone I didn't know stopped me in the hallway and asked "is THAT Dylan Greene you were just talking to?" Heh.

So who was that? If you're reading, let me know. I'm curious.

Here's the photos of my visit with Scoble, and bunch more all over the Microsoft campus: Microsoft photos.