The Difference Between Apple & Microsoft - The Blog Effect

Blogs can be interesting and fun. As I learned, they are also very distracting and I think that one big difference between MS and Apple these days is the approach to blogging. There simply aren't many blogs coming out of Apple. In fact, I don't know of any other than that by Dave Hyatt (of Mozilla and Safari fame).

Blogging is so popular at Microsoft that they have essentially resurrected the role played by Guy Kawasaki in the person of Robert Scoble. His blog is very interesting because it offers an "unsanitized" look inside a big corporation. I don't think Scoble is evil (far from it, most likely) but I can't help but feel that MS will start approaching blogs like another arm of their PR campaign. They know people are doing research online so having MS employees saying good things about MS products in their blogs increases the likelihood that someone will stumble across a positive page...

In 1999 I read some in depth article of how Longhorn will radically change the landscape of computing. At the time, Apple was still trying to pull OS X together. The two companies were at parity (in my opinion) between Windows 98 and Mac OS 9. Fast forward six years and OS X is at it's 5th major release and we're still waiting for Longhorn.

I think that's the big difference in 2005. Apple used to talk about how great their vision of the future was but produced nothing compelling for most of the '90s. Now we find Microsoft talking about how great technology will be with Longhorn, etc. Instead of producing, they're talking. Instead of shipping, they spew forth with blogs.