Attacking a rival company is bad. Attacking the company by attacking an employees personal blog is really bad. Even if the information was right (which it wasn’t) it was still unprofessional and just plain petty.
Scoble made a post and quickly erased it from his own blog which personally attacked a blogger because of who he worked for. For a guy writing a book on Business Blogging it appears he still doesn’t get some of the lessons to be learned from the book. It reminded me of that Forbes Article. Prime example really. The post was entitled “Google employees push sites that only work with one browser” mirrors are here and here. Since so many of Scoble’s regular readers read him via RSS, they are still going to get a copy of this in their feed. D’oh. In fairness Scoble apologised and if there’s one thing about Scoble it’s that he’s genuine. A good lesson is that once the “Publish” is pressed you simply cannot erase what you said, even when you pull it off your site a few seconds later. There were links before going around about how not to write angry emails and angry forum posts. When I go into rant mode against some fuckwit I write a draft post and leave it for a few hours or even a day and then come back and see do I want to still want to publish it. Stick that in the book Rob.
But if you look at the Google employee’s blog entry he doesn’t condone blocking IE from sites. He stated:
Not to mention a bit violent sounding for people like me who just want to advocate a faster web experience.
and from that Scoble stated:
Google is pushing a single-browser solution. And their employees are advocating putting code on your site that’ll turn off Internet Explorer.
Eh no. He saw the code and reworked it so users could detect IE and then display the Google Firefox Ad. It makes you wonder though if Scoble just let the mask slip this time and these are the real feelings he has for Google. You know what though? Scoble is still a great blogger and a real person. He’s made us all like Microsoft a bit more. Maybe not right now but Google will need their own version of Scoble in a few years time.
From discussions at Google Planet, Blog news channel, and Jason Slellen’s blog it looks like majority agrees, that Robert Scobl simply misread the original pro-Firefox pos.
I suppose there’s nothing criminal from the Microsoft employee side to see Google being more agressive, than it actually is. Just the same way as some people perceive bad intentions under any new Microsoft product.
Of course, it would be nice to get Scoble’s comments
Hello? Opera? MSN?
(Just how long has Scoble been working at Microsoft, and he didn’t remember this incident of not so long ago?)