Scoble this morning:

OK, this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

Scoble this evening:

I have been talking to lots of people today, though, inside and outside of Microsoft. In every instance they asked me to keep those conversations confidential. Why? Cause we’re talking about international relations here and the lives of employees. I wish I could go into it more than that, but I can’t. Not yet. See, it’s real easy as Americans to rattle the door and ask for change, but we don’t live there. Saying “give them the finger” isn’t that easy when there are real human lives at stake. And I don’t need to spell out what I’m talking about here, do I?

One thing I’ve heard is that we spell out our terms of service very explicitly on MSN Spaces. Here in the United States we pull down stuff too at government request, like child pornography or other illegal content.

I thought he'd gone way, way too far out on a limb this morning. It's not that he said anything outrageous as a private citizen - but as an employee of Microsoft? It may be his own blog on a non-corporate server, but he's clearly identified himself as a Microsoft evangelist. Which means that - for all intents and purposes - when he speaks there, he's speaking as a Microsoft employee - pretty much without regard to any disclaimers he puts up. Which kind of explains the later post to me - I'm sure that various levels of management at MS were not pleased by the loose cannon behavior.

There's another problem with the earlier approach too. Never mind the topic - he was publicly calling his company out. Now, stop and think about that for a minute. You have an employee, and he's off calling the company wrong in public. How likely is that to gain internal allies? Even if he "wins" a battle like that, the win is pyrrhic. People who might have been on his side will be torqued by the public attack. Believe me, I know - back at ParcPlace and ParcPlace-Digitalk, I engaged in public warfare with management. It was entertaining, but it accomplished absolutely nothing - unless you count making enemies as an accomplishment.

I rather suspect that the goal Scoble had this morning became a lot harder after his outburst. There are things I disagree with my management on, but you won't see me airing them here - because that wouldn't help my chances of convincing them.