TechBloggers

A quick thumbs up to Frank Arrigo and the Microsoft execs who hosted a 'Microsoft bloggers' brunch at TechEd in Sydney this morning.

One of the PR women there looked at me suspiciously (and I can't blame her) when I said I was impressed. The group of 20-odd people comprised of bloggers, media and Microsoft execs spent 1.5 hrs talking all things Vista. It was an open, honest conversation. We had questions and they had answers. If they didn't have answers, they said as much as they knew.

This sort of dialogue represents a subtle, but significant shift in the way tech companies relate to key influencers. Microsoft has recognised that bloggers and media are opposite sides of the same coin, and a new approach to disseminating information is now required. The press release and press conference is dead. The new era is about conversations that are open, transparent and yes, making the vendor vulnerable. But with vulnerability comes respect. And by 'respect' I don't mean that we stop asking hard questions. It's just that we expect real answers and Microsoft is one vendor apparently willing to dip their toe into this brave new world.

Comments

[Ho ho]

Has it occurred to you that you're being had?

Blogging changing vendor PR. Sure.

[Cameron Reilly]

Was Jeff Putt there? Was he able to provide a better answer to "what are the top 5 reasons people should buy Vista" than the "no comment" answer he gave me on gdayworld in June?
http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/06/28/gday-world-137-what-happened-to-winfs-and-why-buy-microsoft-vista/

[Mark Jones]

Hello Ho ho. It's a small thing, but you have no credibility if you comment under an alias. Explain why you hold your view, if you can.

[Mark Jones]

Yep, he was there Cam. Actually another guy answered the question. From memory, stuff like improved file systems, better security (jury's out there), tighter integration btw online and offline work, and a big "other" category of obscure stuff that developers care about.
Oddly, no one talked about its fancy "Aero" graphics... I've been using widgets and the like in OSX for yonks. ;) You might have missed today's Fin, but yours truly and colleages wrote a page 1 yarn about how top Aust corporates and govt agencies won't be using Vista for 2 to 3 years. It's just not seen as strategic.

[Rob Irwin]

But that's been pretty much par for the course for every new OS since, say, Windows95. I always shake my head at suggestions that corporates or governments are suddenly going to buy a bajillion new PCs early next year and break the PC sales drought just so they can run Vista... so your report would be on the money. After all, it's a very brave, very rare, IT Manager who would petition his company to jump on Vista the day it comes out. A delay of a year or two, particularly until at least one SP has arrived and all the company's software has caught up with the new OS is, again, par for the course.

[Angus Kidman]

I can't see I was as impressed by the event as Mark seems to be -- to my mind, it didn't seem any different to any other MS press event I've attended. If they didn't want to answer the question, they didn't, and if they did, there was still a lot of marketing blather.

[Tom Allen]

A dialogue of bloggers eh? I wonder if there were any of Telstra's "Now we are talking" bloggers present... and if so, did they say anything.

[Cameron Reilly]

Ah but Angus, as long as you hit the clubs this year like we did last year... then I'm sure it was a good event. :-)

[Mark Jones]

Angus - granted there will always be marketing blather, but sometimes the gems also fall out, like the details they released re Windows Live online storage. On a different point, Cam reckons I might have been a bit to subtle in this post. I'll be less subtle. The outsourced tech PR agency's self-appointed mission to control information released to the media is crumbling under the weight of new media fragmentation and the commodification of their industry. I'd welcome more blog-style 'conversation' events by other big name vendors in preference to the stream of useless press releases.

[Martin Aungle]

Good points on the death of the press conference/press release. Unfortunately, the majority of the media world out there is still very under-resourced and also under immense time and content pressures, making the press release a necessary evil. I thought a press release was an invitation to start a conversation rather than re-publish the content, but very few journalists take up the offer. To address this, we started running "blog-style", open sessions last year for the media - with dwindling response rates over the course of 2005, usually because the journalists invited simply didn't have the time (at least, that was what they told us). I felt the content of these sessions was really compelling, but there is not much point continuing them if only two or three journos turn up. Maybe if we flew them all up to an exotic tropical paradise for the session, it would make all the difference.