Top Microsoft blogger to resign
A business blogger who changed the wider world view of Microsoft is leaving the software giant for a Silicon Valley start-up. — Robert Scoble's blog about his life and events inside and outside Microsoft became the unofficial corporate voice of the company.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question was already in the air five months ago, when Shel Israel and Robert Scoble debated whether Scoble should leave Microsoft on the Naked Conversations blog. His departure lands at a delicate moment for the company: Windows Vista Beta 2 went public just days earlier, and Microsoft is pushing DVDs because its servers are buckling under download demand — precisely the kind of launch where Scoble's channel-to-the-developers mattered.
It also fits a pattern in Redmond: last October an MSN manager left to launch a startup (the Seattle Times covered his exit), and now the company's best-known blogger follows the same path into Silicon Valley. Reuters picking up the story alongside Rough Type's skeptical 'have face, will travel' take shows how far beyond the tech-blog echo chamber this resignation travelled.
First-order effects
- Microsoft loses its de facto human voice at the start of the Vista Beta 2 push, leaving no obvious individual to play the candid-insider role Scoble occupied through his Scobleizer blog.
- Scoble trades the reach of the world's largest software company for equity upside at an unnamed Silicon Valley startup, betting his personal audience transfers with him.
Second-order effects
- Competing companies now have proof that one employee blogger can become the unofficial corporate voice, so expect formal corporate-blogging efforts inside Microsoft's rivals rather than reliance on a single personality.
- Startups gain a recruiting argument: a name-brand technologist choosing a small firm over Microsoft signals to other restless Microsoft talent that early-stage moves are viable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate communications decouple from institutions — individual bloggers accumulate trust that travels between employers, forcing companies to treat employee voices as assets they rent rather than own.
- The episode strengthens the case that authentic employee blogging beats press releases as a company's public face, accelerating adoption across the software industry.
The trend: Corporate credibility in software is migrating from institutional messaging to individual employee voices whose audiences follow them from employer to employer.