Scoble is Microsoft's Jerry Maguire
There truly is no such thing as bad press.
I tip my cap to Scoble. He's Jerry Maguire for the tech industry - and for the moment, in the blogosphere, he's the man. Microsoft prime blogger not only had the guts to make a very calculated, well-thought out move - he had the naiveté guts to publish/distribute an idea about acquiring an unnamed Web 2.0 entity through his blog, a fashion directly garnering mass public support, perhaps in the hope to garner some community momentum from us "normal folk". In that regard, he's already achieved a major victory. Agree with him or not, I don't care. I'm considering the bigger picture - the fact he publicly blogged a strategic corporate idea. And for doing so, he's gained the admiration of several in the community, including yours truly.
The Maguire-esque move, I expect, will have a very polar effect (and I hope not the fate Tom Cruise suffered in the movie). He'll likely either be lauded as a visionary, a forward-thinker, a valued organizational asset...or be fired and labeled a goat, how-dare-he-assume-that-bravado-who-does-he-think-he-is type of mentality. Scoble's act of martyrdom would ascend him to hero of the oppressed status.
Realistically, will he get "taken out behind the woodshed"? Probably not. MS bigwigs will more than likely commend his thinking, even if they don't necessarily agree with the mechanism through which it was propagated. The worst they can say is "no" to his acquisition proposal and move on. They'd see the indirecty value of his actions and encourage future effort for the company's benefit, lest he take his enthusiasm somewhere else. Besides, that's one less blog post on the Web about how great Google is.
Long story short, it's a bold move - we should all be so liberal (and have management of like open minds).