The Iron Yuppie

God forbid I actually defend Microsoft. Defend Microsoft! The 22 year old me would slap the today me across the face and punch me in the balls. Anyhow, I had a bit of an interesting experience the other night that was further exacerbated by the absurd furor in the past few days over a name.

Incident one: I was sitting talking with a very intelligent person from another company chatting about Microsoft’s RSS strategy. He was absolutely convinced that MS was trying to take over RSS by handling the APIs. I can guarantee that is not the case. Well, not quite guarantee; I don’t know every person in the company and I can certainly only speak for myself. But, I am as sure as I can reasonably be on this one that, like practically every business decision that ever gets made, the singular reason this decision was made was because MS is trying to make life easier for the people they care about (in this case computer users and developers). That’s it. No big conspiracy plot. No thoughts of megalomania. MS talked to developers who produce RSS applications; they say they hate handling downloading content, handling subscriptions, handling content and so on. MS said “hey, we can solve that for Windows users by providing that functionality for them”. If the developers want to use it… great! They can use it! If they don’t want to use it… great! They can do it themselves! If someone else wants to build the exact same APIs on another OS… great! MS looks at it as their job is to build tools and technologies that make the lives of Windows developers and users richer. That’s their only goal.

Some may feel that MS may not deserve a fair chance due to perceived wrongs in the past … fine. But the past is the past. There is absolutely nothing MS can do to change that. MS is doing everything they can possibly do to be open with their decisions and developments in RSS. Really! There are no secrets!

Anyhow, I explained this to him, and he seemed hesitant. I don’t think I was very convincing. It’s one of these things where I try and imagine myself on the other side of the conversation, trying to convince myself. Ultimately, when you don’t believe a person’s perspectives, it’s usually possible to just have a conversation with the facts. I’ll be interested to have that conversation after the PDC and a little more is public.

But then it got even worse over the past few days, pretty much epitomized by this:

Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding

The Blogsphere seems to be aflame with the audacity that MS rename RSS to Web Feeds. First, anyone who thinks that RSS has brand equity beyond about 2000 geeks, I would encourage you to walk down the street and ask the first thousand people you see if they know what RSS is. I’d be fairly surprised if more than 2 could answer correctly. For a few historical instances:

AM/FM becomes “radio”
VHF/UHF becomes “television”
HTTP becomes the “Web” or the “Internet”
HTML becomes “Web Pages”
AAC becomes “Tracks” or “Songs” and is listed but once on iTunes’s home page

There are many others. Consumers don’t know and don’t care about the underlying technology, and that’s what RSS is. Further, RSS isn’t even a noun… it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. You can’t subscribe to a “Really Simple Syndication”… that just doesn’t make sense. Mr. Winer, I have nothing but huge respect for you but let go of the name. Please. I’m not even saying that MS should name it, but it’s got to be named. It’s time.

My reaction to this whole thing has been a bit of a feeling of helplessness… in both situations. We have really done everything we can to stretch out… propose what we are doing before we do it, be open and explain everything. But it never fails … anything attempted is just buried in thousands of negative sniping comments. It’s not the only commentary, there are plenty of positives as well, but it seems practically impossible to get even a reasonable majority of positives. It’s just very frustrating to try and do everything right and still end up with all the insanity. If I could say one thing to the outside world, it'd be the following... "We're doing our best! Really! Help us help you!"

D - LUSG