That's really harsh and inmature, Rory. What would you have done? He certaintly didn't do this: add a video that portrays a really hurtfull message. This one is bellow the belt.

Channel 9 is cool in my opinion.  Microsoft has the best developer community out there, by far.  The amount of material it offers on MSDN alone is astounding.  I don't spend much time on Channel 9, but I applaud the effort.  I watch and enjoy the videos as often as I have time for.  Keep up the good fight, Channel 9ers.  I think Chris Sells would make an excellent addition to Channel 9.  In my opinion Chris is 10x the blogger Scoble ever was.  OK, maybe not as prolific, but Chris mixes the right amounts of geek and humor and usually weaves a good yarn in the process.   I <3 Chris Sells!

Zack -

"That's really harsh and inmature, Rory. What would you have done? He certaintly didn't do this: add a video that portrays a really hurtfull message. This one is bellow the belt."

Dude. It's not serious. It's some guy belching on the floor of his kitchen.

If you want below the belt, then try being on the team that's on the receiving end of a bullshit story.

Don't get me wrong - I'd never expect something to come out in a major publication without some spin, but this was ridiculous.

Thanks to all the FUD out there, MS has become an easy target. All the mindless drones read this crap, don't *think* about it, believe it, and then regurgitate it somewhere else.

But, since you think this is "below the belt," I'll clarify my position with another post. Perhaps I'm being harsh with you because I'm operating from the point of view of actually having seen what happened and what a bunch of crap it was.

Off to write, I guess...

the wired article was funny.  i guess fred has not worked with a PR agency before because even when i was with my 5 person start-up, our PR agency went into tremendous detail on every journalist covering or thinking of covering something we were doing.  that's their job plain and simple.  not sure why he thought the fact that people were thinking and value his view is such a big deal..

I think you're taking this too hard. I'm not particularly pro or anti Microsoft. The article overall to me seemed to be enormously positive about Channel 9.

The comment about the dossier was an interesting aside in the last paragraph. The author there and in the subsequent posts acknowledged that he *expected* any PR organisation to maintain this sort of information. It's just an angle, and wouldn't you write about it if you got your hands on your own PR file?

Even the slashdot discussion, when read at +5 (and who would read below that if they had to read the slashdot fools) mostly said either "so what" or "where can we hire these PR people?"

So if you have to take a message away from this, how about "Channel 9, ... , makes Microsoft look downright visionary."

Hey Rory,

I know this story and the whole Robert Scoble thing has obviously gotten to you and I appreciate why. I for one think that Microsoft and particularly Channel 9 are getting a raw deal but I think your responses could be more measured - just state fact and less unpleasant comments (deserved or otherwise)? It's your blog to write whatever you want but I, as someone who appreciates all that Channel 9 and Microsoft do for the development community, want to see Microsoft and its employees be professional and classy - better than their detractors. There will always be people trying to pull you down (that is Microsoft, Channel 9 and you personally) but when people respond positively and with class it makes the critcs seem more un-neccesarily critical and the FUD more like FUD?!

Hope you don't mind me being honest and direct (I'm still getting used to the whole blog thing - being open and honest with people I don't really know?! - seems odd to me!). I enjoy your work (and the others) on Channel 9 and find it very helpful in my work but I see Channel 9 and Microsoft as a positive 'can do' company and all this bitterness is starting to leave a nasty taste in the mouth. I liked Jeff Sandquist's responses - dignified and matter of fact - works a treat and retains the professional image!

Hope I haven't offended. Please more videos on C9 as your stuff has been excellent to date! :)

See, now I'm slightly confused is that directed at Fred, or at the various reactions to the article?

Sigh... Seems you're taking it a little hard though.

I didn't particularly like the article, it didn't say anything new or interesting (as far as I could see, but then I often miss small details). The PR bit at the end was a gaff, and probably spun for deliberate effect (hey! look! it worked!) but wasn't actually anything serious. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a dossier, and it doesn't seem to have contained anything interesting.

The dossier seemed to me to be more a set of notes of how things have gone, with a few side points about how to deal with certain issues - nothing particularly sinister or Machiavellian. Just background about how the stories' developed so people know which questions have already been answered and who's already been talked to. (I liked the comment about "he's done a fair bit of reporting, so we need to stop giving him avenues to look down" or however it went - I thought it was funny, more subtle than someone asking "when the hell are you going to write this damn thing?")

But if you were looking for manipulations you could probably interpret it that way quite easily.

I guess people just have to realise that companies can't control the message once it leaves the building, so they'd like to have some control of it while it's still in the building. If that control simply involves giving people pre-thought answers to difficult questions that's not that bad... Do people really expect that interviews are entirely off the cuff all the time? I'd imagine interviews would be really stilted and awkward if everyone involved didn't have a good idea as to what the could and should say.

I read the article. I thought it was over all very positive about MSFT's openess initiatives and very down on MSFT's PR people. This is a good thing because it distinguished between what MSFT's evangelism team is doing and the PR folks that are having a heart attack about it and that the employees doing development are on the evangelists side.

*subject change*

This is my beef with Channel 9, I could care less what the PR folks maintain on what reporter. PR folks will always be over cautious idiots. It's in their DNA, they are as bad as lawyers. My beef with Channel 9 is as follows and if you could get this changed I would greatly appreciate it. If not you are still doing a great job.

*What follows is constructive criticism and should not be taken as a slam on Channel 9 or MSFT*

I disagree that it brings a lot of developers to MSFT and eases their fears. It should be restated that it brings a lot of a certain type of developers to MSFT and eases their fears yes, but there is surprisingly little in depth content on Channel 9 for the other kind of developers.

Notable exceptions would be interviews with Bill Hill, Larry Osterman, Raymond Chen etc. about the internal workings of systems built by MSFT.

If you are a devloper writing ASP pages and think that .Net is the coolest thing since sliced bread then Channel 9 is the place for you. If you are developer interested in interfacing with the kernel to develop drivers for a GPS chipset then Channel 9 is definitely not the place for you.

Channel 9 does a lot of preaching to the choir which is good because A.) there is a choir and there didn't used to be, and B.) The choir needs encouragement that they aren't wasting their time using MSFT products, but it isn't good in the fact that it isn't bringing in folks like myself who aren't interested in most of the content on Channel 9.

There are only two reasons I ever watch Channel 9 stuff. One is if I know you had a hand in it because I will always support the work my friends do so long as they aren't killing baby seals or something like that. Two is if the content is, good in depth looks, at why things in Windows work the way they do.

I don't live in a managed world and I seriously doubt I ever will. The really exciting things in computing for me are not happening in the managed realm they are happening quite a bit closer to the machine than that. My job involves sometimes writing in *gasp* Assembler for platforms other than x86 and sometimes for x86 as well. Channel 9 has out of all the many videos I have looked at about 10 that interest me, and probably 5 of those are because the women that were interviewed were hot (yes, I am a pig that way, 8 years in the USMC Infantry will do that to you). Content wise I have only liked the Bill Hill, Larry Osterman, and Raymond Chen videos. There may be a few more that I have missed though and when I get time I look through vids looking for names of engineers I know work on areas of the system I am interested in I do so. There isn't much.

Go interview the C++ compiler team again and this time use some one that can ask decent questions and understand the answers they get back and ask how they fixed templates or why there is virtually no C99 support in the new compiler, or what they did to fix the double precision issues and what the fp flags are actually setting behind the scenes and how it affects code generation etc. Go interview the people I can ask questions if something goes wrong when I am writing a driver and the DDK doesn't have the info I need to fix it. Go interview the people that write the paging and virtual memory allocation for the OS. That kind of content I would be interested in. If you can fix that you will attract more people from my side of the developer isle. Or at least I think you would anyway but I am frequently wrong about a lot of things so take everything I say with a healthy dose of salt.

You might not have time, energy, or desire to do a full refutation, but like others I came away from the Wired article with a positive feeling about MS. So I wonder, what isn't true about it?

Honestly, it would be derelict on Microsoft's part not to backcheck a journalist and try to set context for him. The fact that the dossier ended up in his hands isn't fun, but its contents are also *not evil*, near as I can tell.

Over the years my attitude about MS has changed from a h8ter to someone reasonably excited about what they do. But I still don't believe anyone there for a moment if they say "just e-mail me!"

And it hardly matters, because with the exception of the WMF people, so far this century MS has rocked the house, IMO.

Keep it up, I say.

I agree with other comments about taking the high road Rory.  I mean folks like Fred and Scoble are just trying to make a name for themselves by making crap up about the most succesful company on the planet.  They're fools and liars whose day will come.  By all means, keep pointing out their lies, they need to be called on the carpet, but I don't see the point in portraying how "personally" wounded you are by it.  In the end, it comes across a bit more like the complaining cry baby who got picked on in the schoolyard rather than the boy who became a young man by standing up to the bullies and putting them in their place.

Rob -

"You might not have time, energy, or desire to do a full refutation, but like others I came away from the Wired article with a positive feeling about MS. So I wonder, what isn't true about it?"

Quite a bit, actually.

In the article, nearly all the credit for the creation of 9 was given to Pryor. Scoble also (in character) took more credit than he should have, although he showed more constraint in his boasting than usual (Scoble has, in various forums, taken credit for inventing 9, helping to invent 9, being the one who made 9 successful, blah blah blah).

It left Jeff Sandquist right out of the picture, and Jeff is the guy who's been here the whole time, running everything behind the scenes. He's not visible the way Scoble was, but plays a much larger role in the success of the site.

In response to criticism, Fred's research assistant went online and wrote about how Wired has a strict fact-checking policy that would have ensure their info was good, yet nobody at Channel 9 was even asked about the stories given by people who have left the company. That's *not* fact-checking.

Then there was the "leaked PR document" fiasco. There was nothing odd about the PR document, and there was nothing in it that should have led Fred to have said what he did - he, as well as Chris Anderson, both wrote about having been manipulated by MS the whole way, and they pointed to this PR document as proof.

But the document wasn't even *evidence* of what they were claiming, let alone *proof*. The document was there to help employees feel their away around the interview as well as what to watch for.

The ironic thing - to me, anyway - is that the PR document warned that Fred likes to dig up dirt on people, and that's *exactly* what he did. The way he framed the "leaked document" story was a perfect example of why the document existed in the first place.

But, a lot of tech types seem to wince whenever anybody mentions PR or marketing, not considering that, without marketing, nobody's going to know about your product. And, without PR, it'd be easy to send entirely the wrong message to customers.

Fred isn't stupid. Wired is a huge magazine, and they've been around. They know what's going on, and it seems to me that they took advantage of the anti-PR sentiments prevalent in the tech world to turn a perfectly normal and legitimate email into a PR nightmare.

Add that to the factual inaccuracies and the claim about their fact-checking, and it all gets to be rather offensive.

Dan -

"I agree with other comments about taking the high road Rory.  I mean folks like Fred and Scoble are just trying to make a name for themselves by making crap up about the most succesful company on the planet."

I know - and if they didn't damage other people's reputations while crawling to the top, I wouldn't care, but they *do*. That's just not cool. It's about as selfish as it gets - slamming entire teams and companies just to get more eyes on an article or post.

This industry would be so bloody simple if it weren't for the sleaze. I've had customer-facing positions at Microsoft since I joined, and I've heard the most outrageous things from people, and it all goes back to blogs/magazines/slashdot/whatever.

Quite simply, my tolerance has run out for behavior like that.

"They're fools and liars whose day will come."

I agree with the "fools and liars" part, but I don't know that their day *will* come. Unless someone calls them on what they're doing, nothing's going to happen. There's no auto-correction mechanism in place. If someone's spreading disinformation about the company I work for, then I see it as my responsibility to say something about it.

Customers won't know any better - their opinions, in part, *come* from the media. Even worse, very few people are critical thinkers. Ideas are accepted left and right without validation - accusations alone are almost as good as proof for someone who isn't a skeptic.

It's not easy dealing with this stuff.

"By all means, keep pointing out their lies, they need to be called on the carpet, but I don't see the point in portraying how "personally" wounded you are by it."

*I* was interviewed by Fred, as were other members of my team. He seemed like a nice guy who was out to write a nice article - not turn around with his "facts" and put together one long string of bad info, or to follow up his article with a stunning expose on the existence of PR documents at Microsoft.

The article was about my team, and, having been interviewed for the article, I *do* feel "personally wounded." I also don't care for how little credit Jeff Sandquist was given. The guy works his ass off, but people who aren't even on the team are taking credit for its success.

How is that OK?

"In the end, it comes across a bit more like the complaining cry baby who got picked on in the schoolyard rather than the boy who became a young man by standing up to the bullies and putting them in their place."

I'd rather be honest and express my views than sink to the level of the people I'm writing about. However it comes off to you, I *know* what happened, and it makes me sick. There was no advantage to telling the story the way he did, there was no reason to come out and claim there was a fact-checking system in place when there wasn't, and the affected naivete on behalf of Chris and Fred regarding the PR document was *sleazy*.

I'm upset about the way the article played out because it was such a bunch of BS from start to finish. I don't even know why we were interviewed. Fred might as well have just made it all up.

Do you still think it makes me a "cry baby"?

If so, then I'd suggest you go out, give a reporter the truth, go out of your way to be honest, and then watch as you're repaid by way of bad info and accusations.

It sucks.