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July 14, 2005Ken Dyck Interview about the Microsoft Case Study
Ken Dyck was the Microsoft customer who was featured in the Microsoft case study in the Backbone Media corporate blogging survey. He had made a post about a spelling mistake in Microsoft’s Windows on his own blog; employees at Microsoft picked up the post and responded.
I recently received some criticism of the blog survey case studies interviews in the marketing and PR forum of SoftwareCEO.com, a forum member had suggested I should not accept statements from large company employee like Microsoft at face value, and that their statements were probably just marketing boosterism. Inspired by this critic I thought I’d contact Ken directly to get his thoughts on the case study.
Ken told me that all that had been described in the case study happened, and that while he believes the Microsoft Windows product “is not great, there is no great alternative to windows,� however, “Microsoft is doing reasonably well, Microsoft is so big, and the products so widely used, they are doing the best they can, I believe they are basically good people.�
I asked Ken if Microsoft’s response to his opinion had changed his opinion of the company?
Ken replied, “Not terribly, I’ve been reading Robert Scoble’s blog for a while, his blog had really changed my opinion of Microsoft. I was a long time slashdot.org reader, and used to have a negative opinion of Microsoft, but after reading Scoble’s blog over time and working at a large company. I realized Microsoft was probably not so bad, just a regular big company with lots of people, and the complexity of the company makes them look bad.�
I asked Ken if he thought its necessary to post comments on a company’s site if you want to get feedback as a customer? Ken replied, “Depends on the company, for Microsoft, I knew that Scoble has all sorts of feeds set up, I knew it would fly past what he was reading. I would not use that as a strategy for every company, I really tried my post as an experiment, and it worked.�
Ken and I chatted a little about the nature of large corporations and the blogging strategy at Microsoft, I thought that Microsoft’s blogging strategy had grown very organically, and distributed. With Microsoft having a strategy that lets portions of the company start blogging when they want think it’s a right time for them, Ken said that, “Microsoft is a fairly distributed organization, so a distributed strategy works better at Microsoft, many smaller empires rather than one large monolith.�
Posted by johncass at July 14, 2005 8:29 PM
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Comments
This makes my heart warm. Blogging has changed a lot about how we talk with customers and I believe it's already making our products better.
Posted by: Robert Scoble at July 15, 2005 11:16 AM
