Gartenberg
Friday, February 16, 2007 by Dave Winer.
I was speechless yesterday on hearing the news that Michael Gartenberg was becoming a Microsoft evangelist. 
The people who know Michael are universally supportive. It's quite an endorsement for Microsoft, certainly there are a lot of big tech companies that would be happy to have him on staff. He's open minded and knowledgable, fair and tough. I've seen him in action, I've argued with him, and more important than anything given his new role, received lots of support from him, even though in his past job at Jupiter, it wasn't in any way his job to support people like me.
Now at Microsoft, his job is to help people like us. The people who read this site are all enthusiasts, that's virtually what defines this site. When I ask a question about technology here, no matter how obscure, we get to the answer in an instant, often with lots of interesting sidebars along the way. And we're the people who Microsoft lost in the last few years. Look at this graph to get an idea. 24 percent of the readers of this site use Microsoft's browser. Just a few years ago that number was in the 80s.
A lot of the analysis of Gartenberg's move has been about how he might influence us, but to me that's the blogosphere not understanding its own importance. The true measure of his effectiveness is how much we influence them. Remember this is the world after the audience. If you add up the smarts in their room and the smarts in our room, we win, because there are so many more of us than there are of them, even though Microsoft is a very large company. Their challenge has always been to find a way to harness our power, to make them smarter. When Microsoft has achieved its mission it's been because they did this better than anyone else. Of all the tech companies this is their area of strength, more than Apple, more than Google, Microsoft is of the people, not such an ivory tower, although in recent years, it's looking and acting more like all the other tech companies.
That they hired one of our most brilliant people is good on them. But a big organization like MS not only generates its own gravity, they have their own laws of physics. Over time, people like Gartenberg and Jon Udell (another recent hire from outside) succumb to the logic of their law, and communication starts becoming one-way and therefore ineffective. But for now we have someone inside Microsoft who speaks our language, who doesn't rush to explain everything to us about how things work inside their firewall (as if we care, or should) and instead focuses on solving problems and leveraging opportunities.
Good luck to Michael and good luck to us!
PS: I've received a number of emails asking what percentage of Scripting News readers are Mac users. Answer: 38 percent.
