Puffbox

Robert Scoble’s moonshot thesis has attracted a lot of attention. In it, Microsoft’s most famous blogger talks about ‘the angst that surrounds Microsoft’. Among his five ideas to revitalise the company: ‘buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell machine with dual monitors running Windows Vista. And do it now.’ There’s some sense in this; how can your own people evangelise your products (at their reputed best) when they don’t get to use them for themselves?

(Microsoft has its own language. They talk about ‘eating your own dogfood’ – which is the perfectly laudable principle of using your own products before forcing them on other people. It works fine inside the company – but not outside. There’s simply no context in which dogfood can be made to sound appetising.)

Then you see something like this: statistics which suggest that 90% of search traffic coming out of Microsoft’s headquarters is to Google. (Certainly that would tally with my experience of Microsoft’s UK HQ.) So, taking Robert’s logic one step further… it’s time for Microsoft to block access to Google from its internal network. Force people to use MSN Search, or Live.com, or Windows Live Search, or whatever it’s called these days. And if they don’t like it, well, they’re in the right place to offer some very direct (and literally in-your-face) feedback. 😉