Redmond Blogs, Cupertino Codes
Steve Ruble, who is described in his bio as an evangelist for “the application of Weblogs and RSS in traditional public relations campaigns,” penned a weblog entry yesterday morning that has taken off in the way so many boldly stated but half-baked weblog essays seem to these days (witness the “Rhapsody in Yellow” phenomenon for another example). His core assertion is that Apple’s failure to jump on the corporate blogging bandwagon the way Microsoft and others have will ultimately doom the company.
Whether he’s right about that or not certainly remains to be seen (his pessimism regarding Apple’s financial prospects seems a bit misguided given yesterday’s excellent quarterly report). My personal opinion (mine and mine alone, I should remind everyone) is that developer weblogs can indeed be a valuable channel of communication, particularly where outside developers are concerned, and that they can go a long way toward giving an entity like Microsoft or Apple a human face. I have tried to use my own weblog as a way to share interesting things I’ve learned with other developers, and to, in my own small way, foster a sense of community (it may sound a bit corny coming from someone as low on the totem pole as me, but I really did have that in mind when I organized the WWDC Dinner).
All of that said, there are a number of reasons I think weblogging at Apple should remain the way it is today: informal and non-institutionalized:
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I personally think that every official corporate weblog I’ve ever seen (from Microsoft’s Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy (Why does Channel 9 have a moblog for crying out loud!). As The Corporation reminds us, corporations may be considered “persons” under the law, but it can be a bit grating watching them try to act the part.
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I think Ruble’s notion that “corporate transparency can’t [and, by implication, shouldn’t] be stopped” is not entirely correct. While I do agree that Apple might do better to communicate a little more verbosely in some areas, my feelings about this assertion are mostly summed up by a comment Chris Gervais made on Chuq Von Rospach’s post about Ruble’s article: “While Redmond blogs, Cupertino codes.”
(Update: I’m not completely sure, but it appears that this bon mot should be properly attributed to that perennial weblog detractor Andrew Orlowski of The Register. It appeared at the end of his Tiger Preview piece.)
At least since Jobs’ return, Apple has made a practice of underpromising, overdelivering, and never pre-announcing. And, as much as I would have loved to have talked about some of the cool stuff in the works for Tiger before WWDC, I have to say I agree with this approach, both because it allows Apple more freedom to experiment and change strategies without public embarassments like the Longhorn setbacks and changes in scale, and because it prevents competitors from beating Apple to market with inferior knockoffs (witness, for example, how quickly the BuyMusic.com store followed Apple’s announcement of the iTunes Music Store).
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While I agree that feedback is a good thing, I’ve seen what’s happened to David Hyatt’s weblog in the past (remember why he disabled comments?), and I, for one, would not want to see my weblog turned into a bug tracking database. In the past, I’ve considered posting occasional interesting tidbits about OS X updates, but my fear has always been that if I was to do so, my site would quickly become a repository for information about problems people experienced with the update. And I can barely keep up with my email, let alone track bugs through my weblog comments. Large-scale software development requires industrial strength bug tracking like Radar, and a weblog comments system just isn’t up to the task.
In a lot of ways, weblogs (at least developer weblogs) are just a new form of something that’s been around in the form of Usenet or listservs for a long time—the only difference is that now, as Mark Pilgrim has wryly observed, the technical discussion arrives interspersed with cat pictures. This informality is, to me, what makes weblogs so fun and what ultimately makes them kind of an awkward fit for corporate entities. I agree that it would be great for more Apple employees to be webloggers (though far more than Ruble imagines already are) and discuss what they can about Apple, but i agree with Chuq’s conclusion that it’s probably better for everyone if they don’t do so from behind their badges.