Ego-crazed Scoble burns MS bridges

IT'S GETTING more unlikely that Microsoft's departing geek blogger Robert Scoble will return to the House of Redmond anytime soon.

Even by his own standards of creating fights in empty rooms, a Wednesday post by The Scobleizer was a case of grabbing the sacred cow, ritually humiliating it and posting the pictures on Channel 9 before collecting his salary from the cow's owner. Even now, respondents are posting stunned responses.

The post here entitled "Why Wall Street didn't believe Steve Ballmer (and what he can do about it)" hit new heights of self-aggrandising and must have made grisly reading for Microsoft's PR.

Scoble notes that MSFT stock is "in a freefall", suggests that the reasons for the lack of Street faith are "easy" -- a lack of "grassroots" appeal, natch.

The following passage suggests that Citizen Scoble is pretty close to the wandering around a fairy castle, talking to himself and dreaming of Rosebud stage.

"Ballmer should not listen to his PR team and instead should live the blogging way.

"Huh?

"Did you miss that I turned into an international news story that has gotten more attention than everything Microsoft announced at its big TechED conference this week?

"How did I do that?

"I talked with the grassroots FIRST. Against the advice, by the way, of a lot of PR people (they wanted me to break the news to Walt Mossberg or someone "important" first — they thought that's how I was going to get the biggest story going).

They all are wrong."

A few posters note that Microsoft's problems might be more about delays to key products and the like rather than the ability to write lots of words very quickly.

The pick of them, perhaps:

"Steve Ballmer pitching at Gnomedex? If he ever takes that advice he really will have lost it. At his level of wealth and power he has FAR more important things to do .. like, taking a dump, or chatting with his family.

"Robert, you had God knows how many years to explain to the grassroots why Longhorn/Vista matters and even you - despite being more press-worthy than TechEd - failed and bailed.

"And btw, as long as you're still a MSFT employee, it's *Mr* Ballmer to you."

Still, with his colourful approach to punctuation, prolific output and ability to stretch out wretchedly thin arguments, Scoble is undoubtedly making a superb career move in embracing the media.

Welcome to Her Majesty's gutter press, Robert! µ