On diluted messages and inert platforms

Tycho, one of the co-authors of the venerable gaming comic strip Penny Arcade, made some comments about Microsoft and Microsoft bloggers that “Let’s Kill” Dave from Microsoft’s XNA team found objectionable.

To sum up, Dave doesn’t like the accusation that Microsoft bloggers are a “phalanx which encircles the web, [with a collective] position as explicit partisans [which] dilutes their message automatically.”

Are (Microsoft) Corporate bloggers “diluted”? 

As an ex-Microsoft blogger, I see Tycho’s point of view: of course what we say as Microsoft employees is tempered by the many things that Dave enumerates in his response.  That caveat applies to corporate bloggers from any company.  But I wouldn’t have said that corporate blog messages are necessarily “diluted.” I would have gone with “influenced.”

I quite enjoyed walking the tightrope that had “your values and beliefs” on one end of the balancing pole, and “staying employed” on the other. 

Let me take two examples from my blog where I talked about Vista (an easy love-hate target): I whinged when Vista was delayed yet yet yet again, by comparing Vista to Godot, who ultimately never showed up.  But I also subsequently fought hard to help convince a conservative member of the Microsoft Ireland leadership team that, as part of Vista’s marketing campaign in Ireland, we should associate it with a popular and witty Irish duo whose potty mouths make Eric Cartman look like Charlie Brown.  And I still believe that Vista even today could benefit from the edgier feel and half the love that aging Podge and Rodge get in Ireland.

[Update 28 Jul: What an awkward paragraph.  What I meant to say is that if Tycho's concern is that the "phalanx" of Microsoft bloggers exists principally to parrot a company message, I instead found myself frequently blogging "off message" from any script he could care to imagine, and I was never criticized or repremanded for doing so.]

Remember also that Microsoft bloggers like Robert Scoble have been known to be unashemedly caustic towards Microsoft in the past, triggering appropriately passionate responses.

When reading a corporate blog, I consider what the corporate bloggers say, as well as what they don’t say.  Sometimes silence is conspicuous.  There were a lot of announcements and products I didn’t weigh in on as a Microsoft employee.  Sometimes I was busy.  Sometimes there was another reason.

So to sum up, I never would have felt the message of my MSDN blog was being diluted by Microsoft.  Influenced, for sure, but since “full disclosure” of who employed me was explicit in my blog’s URL, I thought that my association with Microsoft should only make my blog more interesting.

Is Microsoft’s Gaming Platform Strategy “Inert”?

The one part of Tycho’s post that I do disagree with is that Microsoft’s gaming platform strategy has grown inert.  As per my recent posts here (done post-Microsoft, by the way, in case you question my objectivity), XNA is continuing to deliver on Microsoft’s vision of bringing game development to the people on a current-gen platform.  Heck, when anyone with a bit of coding know-how can create and share their own home-brewed Guitar Hero-esque games, everyone wins. 

And speaking of sharing (and a dynamic platform strategy), XBox Live is still my favourite example of “software plus services” done right.  As a member of that community, I see it as a rich and evolving online platform for community and gaming.  (Aside: I agree with lowbrowculture – I absolutely adore my Nintendo Wii (and my Nintendo DS), but Nintendo’s online component is a train wreck.  How can that company do so much right, and get the online platform so wrong?) 

Let the XNA initiatives and XBox Live continue to evolve (it’s already happening more rapidly than I expected), and we’ll see what innovations continue to appear.  It’s impossible for me to see the platform as inert when there’s so much exciting stuff going on as I write.

Dave, keep up the great blog, there’s a growing game dev community that is eager to hear from you!  And Tycho, as always, I appreciate your candid commentary.  Man, after over six years of reading your comics, I feel I owe you a pint or something.

What the heck, pints all around.  There are some great microbrews here north of Toronto.

– 

[Update 4:00PM: It occurred to me to wonder why, in the context of this discussion, did I not use a gaming example from my Microsoft blog? The pithy answer I gave above is that Vista's an easy target.  But there are a few other reasons: (1) I didn't have a lot of negative news to convey about Microsoft's gaming strategy. (2) I didn't want to go anywhere near breaking Microsoft gaming news.  I have good friends in some of the Microsoft game studios, and so I had (and have) to be very cautious about what I write.  And (3) the entertainment division in Microsoft was notoriously the quietest of all divisions internally.  Average Joe Schmoe employees like me often heard the really cool gaming news just moments before it broke.  I guess they didn't trust us not to blab - and probably rightly so :) .]