Thursday, 5 June 2008

It's Steve Uncovered


This posting is a little out of the ordinary. It is not about my day ahead, my day past or even a hint about things to come. I’m still zipped on that one!

This post is all about someone else’s postings. It’s a kind of ‘blog on a blog’.

The name is Steve Clayton. His ID is Geek in Disguise. He is the CTO of the Microsoft UK Partner Group. The Geek seems to divide his time between Reading, Redmond and the Cloud.

I am a regular reader of ‘The Geek’s’ postings; partly, because they are not too Geekish. That is one of the strengths of the blog. For M/S based fare, it uses non–Microsoft ‘standards’ terminology: Words like Apple, Mac, ‘Ithings’ and even (close your eyes) G**gle.

Yet having digested 12 months+ of the Geek’s meanderings, I am still not totally hooked on whether he is ‘leading’ the M/S debate, ‘reflecting’ it or occasionally ‘following’ it. There is a difference. And that I guess is the dilemma.

One of the biggest challenges of writing a regular blog is resisting the urge to say what you really want to say. That’s because ‘It is still an alpha’, ‘it is still NDA’d’, or it is still ‘for internal circulation only’. You want to let the cat out of the bag, but the Service Contract says you cannot. So you sit on the really exciting bits and try and make the public domain stuff sound interesting.

Stuff like ‘Software as a Service’. Or should that be ‘Software and a Service’. Then there’s the stuff about the ‘Cloud’ and the bits about ‘Facebook’. So the jury is out.

As I guess it is on most ‘business-orientated’ blogs. Right now, I would like to say more about Pingar. I cannot. The same applies to HBI Software in Bangalore. And The WH Consultancy in Tauranga.

Leading, reflecting or following? It’s your choice.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

thanks for the comments Peter and allow me to comment back :)

you're right, sometimes I'm reflecting, other times following and occasionally leading. My sense is the latter is more of what you and maybe other readers are after. i sense a post of my own coming on this...


the challenge lies in how much I can tell of stuff I know and the answer is actually not very much. my role is quite internally focused these days - providing input on strategy and sitting at the back of the room when that strategy gets announced. for example there will be some big announcmements at Partner Conference next month that I get involved in but will never be able to announce on my blog.

so product, services and strategy wise you'll rarely if ever see me truly "lead" on my blog. however, when it comes to commenting on what we could do differently as a company and try to lead that debate I think I have more to offer. today's post on Brand is a stab at that. I pondered for a long time about whether I should share my views and decided I felt strongly enough that I should...so did!

thanks for making me think some more....you were right :)

Peter W-H said...

Thanks Steve for finding the time to comment back.

Blogging can be frustrating. You want to say soooooooo much, but.....

I'll keep on checking into the Geek for those moments of 'disclosure'. Your 'Brand' posting did that.