Scoble’s Bridges
Scoble says “farewell“, and Nick Carr says that Scoble might be burning bridges. Scoble tends to never say bad things about past employers, so perhaps Nick doesn’t trust Scoble’s comments about the situation. On the other hand, I’ve known Scoble since three companies before he worked at Microsoft, and I’ve never hesitated to say exactly what I think about specific high-profile employee departures, so maybe what I say will have some credibility.
First, I think Nick is completely missing the point when he talks about us hiring Scoble to be the “public face” of the company. If we had hired Scoble to be a shill, then Nick’s arguments apply. But we hired Scoble to help drive a new level of transparency and a new style of direct grassroots community engagement (through channel 9). As part of this, Robert showed that it’s safe to be an independent voice engaging directly with customers and critics through blogs, and helped change the culture of the company (or IMO, helped bring out the culture that was already there). The value of Scoble was that his voice wasn’t “paid for”.
Next, what does this say about our continued commitment to transparency? Nick asserts that we would pay any price to keep Scoble if we truly cared. But I think the answer is a lot simpler than that. Scoble accomplished everything he set out to accomplish, probably more than he or anyone else expected. Seriously, what was he going to do next? Go to Google and help them be more transparent? Write another book about “Business Blogging 2.0″? Please… The revolution is secure — I am sure there will be a cottage industry in seeking out imagined threats to the revolution, but the fact is that the company and the industry have changed for good now.
As for “burning bridges”, Scoble built bridges throughout the company, and between the company and the rest of the industry. He could easily hang out at Microsoft, resting on his laurels and coasting for the next ten years. And while I would like to believe that Microsoft has enough interesting and challenging opportunities to keep a guy like Scoble interested, he’s not exactly the kind of guy who “rests” or stays at one company for life. And we aren’t exactly the kind of company who need to lock people in for life. If it was good for him and good for us, why cry? We can only hope that the future holds many more relationships like that. Scoble will always be a friend, but for now we say farewell to him as a co-worker, and I give him my heartiest e-bay seller rating: “A+ Great Communication, Would Do Business With Again!”