Steve Rubel wondered about the "soft launch" of MSN Virtual Earth last night - in particular, the embargo on information that MS was practicing. Scoble verified that later on, in this post:

Yeah, it is the second time in a week that I can't talk about something when everyone else is talking about it (the earlier one was when the name "Windows Vista" leaked out and about 2,000 blogs had talked about it before I was able to admit that was the official name. For instance, Elliott Back writes: "Wow! These are just my first impressions, but it seems like Microsoft has built a Google-Maps killer!"

I was asked to hold off until 9:01 p.m. PT tonight on the Virtual Earth stuff. A few people discovered our URL's while we turned on the servers to perform performance tests and now we're off to the races. Tons of blogs are talking.

Scoble notes that the upshot of the embargo was that everyone else got a chance to talk about Virtual Earth before MS - which, to my mind, is bad PR (read Scoble's post - he seems to think so as well, calling this old school PR).

There are still plenty of PR people who think you can hold back information until a critical point, and then open the flood gates. That may have been true once, but it isn't true any longer - especially for the large outfits like MS, IBM, Oracle (et. al.). There are simply too many people watching their every move, ready to pounce out with information. A decade ago, that didn't matter too much - an early leak meant that information hit the printed page a day (or a week) later. Now, early information leaks immediately.

Why does that matter? Well, it matters because of the nature of message definition that now exists. With an artificial embargo on information, other people get to take a crack at defining you. First impressions matter a lot more than anything else, so if a negative one gets early play, you'll have a hell of a time countering it. That didn't happen to MS in this case, but it's a big gamble to take. It's a new world of PR out there, and two many people are still playing from the old playbook.