I'm asked: "Can you separate M$ lip service from fact for us? "

I’ve received a great number of emails in response to my “Scoble Gap” post.

The first that has prompted me to white included this question.

“Can you separate M$ lip service from fact for us? That has to be the toughest part of your future.”

By this I assume the poster is refereeing to Microsoft MARKETING.

I’m not a fan of most marketing, ours or anyone else’s. But, it’s a necessary part of business. Marketing’s role is to advise the consuming audience of the potential benefits and values of the product they represent or “market”.

As geeks, we often see most marketing “collateral” as too many words containing little or no information.

It’s a hard balance, at Microsoft we have marketing folks that are really non-technical, and then we have folks that work in marketing capacity that are very technically competent (Brian Goldfarb).

It’s not what our marketing says that worries me. It’s when our people, especially our executive management are fully buying our own “stuff”.

MS Haters probably see this as arrogance. I see it more like a parent as he/she looks at their own children and have to work to set aside personal bias and proactively look for “areas that could use improvement”.

I have “that type of discussion” frequently inside Microsoft, now I’m just committing to make most of those opinions public.

So, call us out on what you think is “lip service” by emailing me though my blog – I won’t shy away from topics. J