I read a
theory on Doc Searls's blog that the reason you don't see many employee blogs from Apple and Google is that you don't need to blog when you're winning.
Today we see good reasons why both Apple and Google should be blogging.
For Apple, there's quite a bit of confusion on the blogs after their announcement last night of a podcasting client to be built into iTunes. As the designer of the functionality they're adding, I say this is a good move.
But the blogs are also carrying Jobs's offensive and misguided characterization of podcasts as the "Wayne's World of radio." He got it backwards. Wayne's World is fiction, podcasting is real. Of course a baby boomer who owns a movie studio is likely to see it this way. We were brought up on television, our thinking is rooted in the centralized monoculture of the 20th century.
Another key difference between Wayne's World and podcasting is that there was only one Wayne's World, there are thousands of podcasts, and there will be millions in the coming years. In fact, Apple has just helped cement that, along with their excellent audio tools that ship with the Mac OS.
So this could be a time for Apple people to be crowing, their non-existent bloggers could be answering questions, acting as their sales force, their barrier to entry, their answer to Bill Gates's sniffing that cell phones will soon usurp the position of iPods. Bill Gates understands something about truly large scale adoption of technology, and Gates lets his people blog. He's a smart businessperson for that.
On the same day, Tim Bray notes that the terms of use of AdSense for Feeds make no sense and wonders why he doesn't know who to contact, and why that person doesn't have a blog, in fact, why doesn't Google have any personal connect to the blogging world, as Scoble connects for Microsoft or Zawodny and Beattie for Yahoo (and Bray himself for Sun).
One has to wonder if Google really means to trample the web or are they just stumbling around, like the drunk elephant that IBM used to be, stamping out the little critters and getting ready for their own fall?
Both Apple and Google will soon be under assault, it seems certain, by larger competitors who have let their people blog. To think they can afford not to be present in the arena of the present (not just the future any more) is the kind of dangerous naivete bordering on hubris that could make them lose their competition, by default, by not even showing up.
Dave
PS: Worth noting that more than a few of the late innovations in the Mac OS came out of Dave Winer Labs. I know they won't thank me for it, but I also know they must appreciate it at some level.
# Posted by Dave Winer on 5/23/05; 6:45:49 AM - --
