Should Scoble Leave Microsoft?
David Tebbutt over at Teblog speculates that Scoble may have outlived his usefulness to Microsoft and so they are allowing him to wander around meeting people, setting up his er... Blogger Dinners and building up a powerful personal brand.
Context & Ripple Effects
David Tebbutt's Teblog piece is speculation, not a confirmed departure — but it lands at a pointed moment. Microsoft's MSN Spaces removed Chinese blogger Zhao Jing's popular blog on New Year's Eve, part of a censorship posture that has grown more aggressive since the prior summer, and the question of whether Microsoft's top blogger should walk away only has force because the company staked its conversational credibility on voices like Scoble's.
The confirmed record shows Scoble doing exactly what Tebbutt describes — Blogger Dinners, working the room, compounding a personal brand — while his own riposte, published under 'Have I outlived my usefulness?', laughs the premise off ('Heheh'). With Microsoft's CES press activities in Las Vegas starting January 5, an active WMF vulnerability being worked, and Windows Vista compatibility calls landing from Raymond Chen, the timing makes the joke a live question.
First-order effects
- Scoble heads into CES week carrying the MSN Spaces takedown of Zhao Jing's blog — precisely the kind of corporate action his humanizing, conversational role exists to explain to the developer and blogger community.
- Microsoft faces a public test of whether its most famous employee blogger is genuinely independent or tolerated because, as Tebbutt implies, he no longer threatens anything.
Second-order effects
- Every Microsoft message that needs community trust — the WMF vulnerability response, Vista's decision to drop support for some older DVD drives — routes through a channel whose credibility Tebbutt's argument says is already spent.
- If the 'usefulness' framing sticks, Microsoft's blogging investment starts paying diminishing returns: the same personal brand that drew audiences to the company can detach from it and keep the audience.
Third-order effects
- The durable question Tebbutt raises — whether an employee's personal brand belongs to the person or the payroll — is the one every corporate blogging program confronts once individual voices grow larger than the press office that hosts them.
- Censorship decisions made for one market (MSN Spaces in China) now carry a measurable cost in another: the goodwill asset built by employee evangelists, suggesting companies will have to price policy compliance against their conversational reputation.
The trend: Corporate blogging is maturing from a PR novelty into an accountability channel where star employee bloggers absorb — and expose — the contradictions between their employers' policies and their own credibility.