Microsoft and the Cluetrain II

Reading the points of the Manifesto conjures the vision of a geek in the cube shaking his imaginary wizard staff at the mighty Mount Corporation saying "you will respect me, or I will destroy you."

The basic concept of the book is that if your customers get together online, then you should get involved with them and talk to them about you in the same way they do, forgetting the ‘corporate marketing etiquette’.

Microsoft always treated developers well. MS development tools were and still are the best development tools for any platform, and MSDN is the best developer’s resource in the planet. Anyway, since the release of the .NET framework we started to see more involvement from the technical guys in news.microsoft.com, develop.com mailing lists, and lately they started blogging (for a complete list of this activities, see Don’s post).

Most of this is new, and it’s inline with what the Manifesto promotes. I am not saying that they read the book and are applying it. Perhaps this is because they see that their main competition for the developer’s heads comes from in the Java/Open Source world, which has a strong sense of community, and wanted to create a better one.

Anyway, I love what they are doing.