On The Vista/Office Delay: Where Were The Naked Conversations?

When word first came out that the consumer version of Vista was going to slip until after the new year, I knew what was coming. And come it did, a blizzard of bad commentary mixed in with more bad news, FUD, and a lot of yelling, screaming, piling on, and gnashing of teeth. I imagine some hair got pulled somewhere in there as well.

Look, this was going to be a bad news situation no matter what. One of those we’ve got to suck it up, take some lumps, and get on with business moments. I have no idea what went on in the halls of Microsoft, but I do see the result of what didn’t happen. The initial press release that came out was woefully inadequate. Trying to spin this news into a things are going great mode that was so transparently desperate that it was laughable.

I haven’t seen a worse case of letting the spinners run the show since, well, since anyday the Bush White House trys to pull the wool over our eyes. Whoever made the calls on this couldn’t spin their way out of a blender.

Marc Orchant called it well and to the point. “This has been one of the worst displays of entropic communications I've ever witnessed, especially from a company that is usually pretty solid with their message.”

And now the spinners and flacks are having to do damage control on all kinds of FUD, and news of a reogranization. Scoble is on the front lines calling for heads to roll for bad journalism, and wondering why bloggers didn’t jump in to defend against the FUD.

My $.02? I think if the bad news had been doled out with respect to the intelligence of the audience you would have seen a different result. Instead a lot of confidence was shaken and trust tempered. I hope with whatever reorganization is going on, someone in charge of the Microsoft spin machine reads Scoble’s book. The irony here is that instead of “bringing clarity to your world” we’ve really muddied up this Vista.