It was last fall that Chris Anderson invited me over to Wired Magazine for lunch “Condé Nast Style” (they have a private chef) and it was all pretty cool. Chris gave me a personal tour of the facilities and told me all sorts of stories behind the history of Wired Magazine. I would be lying if I didn’t say that this was a bit of a thrill for me. In the tour I saw where Apache Server was coded, a wall crowned with every cover of the magazine and a view of their future through the new www.Reddit.com headquarters with lots of room for expansion. Lunch was great. I sat with Chris and a number of senior folks from his team. Our conversation focused on the work we’re doing at Microsoft around blogs, Channel 9 and community. Chris was very interested in all the details and what originally was intended to be a short lunch stretched out into the afternoon. We exchanged plenty of stories with Chris’s team taking plenty of notes. One fun part of the lunch was a quote by Chris. I was explaining how at Microsoft we refer to our employee guidelines for blogging as “Don’t be stupid”. The idea being that we believe we have very smart employees and trust that they know the smart thing to do on their blog. Chris jumped in with, “wow, that is smart and a heck of a lot better of guidelines than “Don’t be evil”. 
(I need to remember that). Lunch ended with Chris assigning Fred Vogelstein to “write the story of Microsoft and transparency.”
Over the years I have spent a lot of time with press, bloggers, analysts and even other companies telling the story of Channel 9, transparency at Microsoft and how it all started. It is with great honor and pride that I am able to share the amazing work by over 4500 employees who blog today (voluntarily at Microsoft) and the work done by my team on Channels 9 and 10. The interview process with Wired would serve to be very different than any I’d been part of previously. Throughout the process I’d spend countless hours with Fred. Fred conducted phone interviews with me, shadowed my team at the Consumer Electronics Show and spent a full day on the Microsoft campus with me and my team. Fred saw firsthand how we filmed interviews and published in real-time, he had unbridled access. Throughout it all Fred took pages and pages of feverish notes. I like to think he got to know a lot about me and I enjoyed my time with him.
As the interview process when on I learnt from Fred too. Wired is struggling to understand how to embrace this new world of transparency. “In the mainstream world of scoops and exclusive stories how can you be transparent too?”, “What happens to the magazine if we push every story online in the beginning?” Fred marveled at our use of technology to create Channel 9 and was envious of our use of tech to get a story out in a timely manner. It was obvious that this interview would also serve as learning experience for Wired. The irony in this is not lost on me that a Magazine that doesn’t usually speak favorably about our company was listening very closely to what we did and how we did it for Channel 9. It will be interesting to watch and see what happens with www.Wired.com as they integrate the lessons learned from this interview.
If you flash forward to today, many months later the story has finally shipped in the magazine and is also available online. There are a number of gems in this piece that talk about the traffic growth of Channel 9, the explosion of employee blogs at Microsoft and how it began. Unfortunately though attempts to invent tension that really wasn’t there. Transparency did take a huge leap forward via Channel 9 and blogging, but that is not where it all began, it had already started. Transparency is something that has been happening at Microsoft for a long time. Much of this work actually began all the way back on CompuServe forums where our employees began answering questions. Since then folks at Microsoft have been connecting with customers in any way they can. Employees have done so online, at our conferences, over lunch, through newsgroups, forums and today via blogs. Our employees are very proud of the work we’re doing, we know we’re not flawless and that is why we are out in those conversations every day. We do this to learn and hopefully in a “Listening to learn” fashion, a name that I chose for this blog when I first began it. Blogging and Channel 9 take this all to a new level and helps put a human face on our company.
Channel 9 was created by a dream team of individuals and I am thankful every day for the experience and being able to be a part of that. The article does a very poor job of spelling out who those folks were and the right decisions made that have gotten us to today. Over time I believe it is important to get that story out and is something I plan to do more of via this blog.
Fred makes a bunch of noise over on his blog about the background information that was accidentally sent to him. It is unfortunate that he was accidentally sent to him, but I believe if you look at the overall story timeline here (he started this process all the way back in October folks) I think its pretty understandable that we have folks assisting us in providing background information, etc. Another interesting part that I almost forgot (as this all started so long ago) was that I was able to turn the tables on Fred and interview him over lunch in Vegas at CES. I’ve posted that interview here on Channel 10.
So that’s about it on this from me today, It will be interesting to watch my favorite news aggregation site Techmeme cover the rest.
Update: I change the link to the Channel 10 interview with Fred to a proper permalink on the site.
