Thou dost protest too much, Robert

Blogs

Posted by Mathew @ 12:12 pm on February 11 2006 | |

The Scobleizer is more than a tad upset that everyone is so excited by Google’s hosted Gmail project (he calls some of the posts “rewritten press releases”) and complains that no one is giving Microsoft any love, despite the fact that its Live domain project has been around for awhile now, and apparently has about 20 universities up and running already.

As I mentioned in a comment on Robert’s post (which you can see in the sidebar, in my CoComents box), that’s a fair point, but to drag the whole conflict of interest bogeyman into it just because a few bloggers run Google ads is way over the top - and it demeans his argument. Like Nick Carr, I find the whole thing a little bizarre. For the record, I’ve made a total of about $0.07 from my Google ads. It’s fine to complain about what you think is unfair treatment, but to impugn the motives of a host of people like Paul Kedrosky is offside (Paul’s hilarious response is here).

The bigger question, of course, is why Google’s move got so much “press” and Microsoft’s didn’t. The simple answer is that Google is cool and Microsoft is not. When it comes to email and hosted applications, Google is the upstart competitor and Microsoft is the dominant player - who wants to root for the dominant player? No one. People like to cheer for the underdog (although I admit that calling a company with a market cap of $110-billion an underdog seems a little odd).

I also find it interesting that at Dare Obasanjo’s blog, right underneath his post complaining about how little attention Microsoft gets for things, is a post about how confused the company’s marketing is when it comes to MSN and Live.com. Could that be part of the problem? Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect thinks the lack of marketing support might have something to do with Microsoft’s desire to avoid cannibalizing Outlook. And old-media defender Scott Karp thinks bloggers need some kind of “Chinese wall.”

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Mathew posted this article under Blogs, Google on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 12:12 pm. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and you can also view Technorati Linkbacks or check for other responses using YackTrack.

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Discussion

Comments for “Thou dost protest too much, Robert”

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Jeremy Wright 2 years ago 1 point
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This is one of those issues that Robert'll come around on. I've known him for a few years, and while he's great at sticking his neck out and slapping folk around, he's big enough to admit when he's wrong.

I think part of it is that the Redmond / Seattle culture is still fairly self-contained (as is the West Coast one), so that when he gets a lot of agreement on things which are actually quite silly.

But, hey, that's what blogging's for, right? :)

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vinnie mirchandani 2 years ago 1 point
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Let's do the math. Microsoft spent $ 8.7 billion in sales and marketing last year. That is more than Google's revenues.

How much does Microsoft spend on advertising with WSJ and InformationWeek? With Gartner and Forrester? With Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs? Should we not ask if their reporters, industry and financial analysts are magnitude more biased towards Microsoft than some blogger who earns pennies from Google ads?

This week has been full of "conflict of interest" discussions. The WSJ on bloggers. InformationWeek on industry analysts. But as I wrote earlier - The buyer is in charge, has been in charge, will be in charge. That is why most well structured procurements take input from a number of sources and have various steps in the process, and minimize any bias any single influencer may have.

And larger vendors still have more bucks to spend on the traditional influencers. So the question to ask is - Microsoft, why did you not publicize the MSN announcement yourself - spend a bit of the $ 8+b budget? Could it be because you really do not wwant to cannibalize your enterprise Outlook revenues?

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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Thanks for the comment, Jeremy. Robert seems like a nice guy, which makes his response in this case seem all the more outlandish. I hope he realizes how unbalanced it makes him look -- and how that could affect his hard-won credibility.

Mathew

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mark evans 2 years ago 1 point
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love the "google is cool, msft is not" idea. if truth be told, msft was never cool. it was always the kid who joined math club, while google played sports and flirted with the cheerleaders...or something like that.

mark

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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Just another thing for Bill Gates to be pissed off about -- he's spent the last couple of decades being the dorky one next to Steve Jobs, and now he's got Larry and Sergey to deal with too. At least he's got his money to keep him company :-)

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Scott Karp 2 years ago 1 point
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Rather than "old-media defender" I prefer "ghost of media past"

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random8r 2 years ago 1 point
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Dude! I'd have to say that it's not just google is cool and microsoft is not. Google's stuff just plain works, man. How awesome is that search engine? It's fast and efficient, and makes the internet a joy to browse.

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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Good one, Scott.

And I agree, random8r -- in fact, that's probably part of what Google cool. And being a cool underdog definitely helps :-)

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Stuart MacDonald 2 years ago 1 point
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Sigh. Well, points to Scobe for being a company man, sorta. At least this time. But jeepers, the whole "MSFT gets no respect" thing is soooo old. And it's not true. Hard truth: it's not that they don't get respect. It's just that they don't get as much respect as their inward gaze would expect them to get. The good folks in Redmond live in a special, magical world called (425), much like (416) only folks in (425) have more money and apparently more attractive navels upon which to gaze. If they spent a wee bit less time locked up in analysis and politics, perhaps their actual innovative output would match their view of what it should be.

-- Stuart

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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Agreed, Stuart. Plus I have to believe that there might be just a tiny bit of truth in what Vinnie says about not wanting to cannibalize Outlook, no?

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vinnie mirchandani 2 years ago 1 point
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guys, not sure why MS feels picked on. They have been laughing all the way to the bank to be able to pay a dividend of $ 30 b, spend $ 20 b in R&D last 3 years, $ 25 b in sales and marketing last 3 years. With that R&D they should have produced all kind sof whiz bang stuff. Instead they are late on so many releases. With that marketing bugdet (and star salespeople in Bill and others) they should have sweet talked every one. Most companies would die for a fraction of their budgets. May be reality is setting in that they have not seen much return for the R&D and marketing and customers want a "dividend" in the form of lowered pricing. But bloggers or Google did not bring that predicament on,. It is self inflcited. They need to lose weight and start delighting the market with product again...

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Stuart MacDonald 2 years ago 1 point
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You bet there's something to Vinnie's comment. And, as I said over on Rob Hyndman's blog, fact is MSFT doesn't actually *do* Marketing. They have a bunch of folks charged to Sell The Damn Thing after Planning and Dev have decided to ship it, and after the decisions have wormed their ways through the analysis/paralysis, everybody-gets-a-say and political infighting phases of the years-long process involved with getting anything out the door.

-- Stuart

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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I agree, Vinnie. Random8r has a point -- Google is cool because it's stuff is simple, and it just works. Even the betas are better than Microsoft's "finished" products. Surely with all that money, Microsoft could come up with some cool stuff -- stuff so cool we could get past the "Microsoft isn't cool" stigma. But they are too smothered by the bureaucracy of being a giant entity. They're like the phone company now. And how cool is that?

And Stuart is right too -- Microsoft is like a production machine, designed to promote the production of software machinery. Marketing seems to be about as lively, and as much an afterthought, as it is for the government. Big, plodding, stodgy, boring -- uncool.

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Stuart MacDonald 2 years ago 1 point
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I feel compelled to add here...you can't forget that most of the folks at MSFT are among the smartest human beings on the planet. Seriously. Scary smart, accomplished individuals, among the very best at whatever it is that they do. And for the most part, they are extremely well intentioned. It's just that, damn it, they do a remarkable lousy job of (a) getting out of their own way and (b) really comprehending and responding to what consumers (I can't speak to corporate clients) want.

The other thing worth noting? GOOG is looking down the barrel of the *exact same thing*. Maybe even worse, short term, because while they might not have bureaucracy, they are fighting the management of colossal employee growth, phenomenal expectations, and an incredible strain on their culture. No easy task.

-- Stuart

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Mathew 2 years ago 1 point
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That's a good point, Stuart -- hiring 10 PhDs a day, or whatever it averages out to over the last year, and accumulating a market cap like that has a way of putting a strain on a company. Maybe that explains things like Web Clips :-)

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