Robert Scoble writes
Rob Fahrni answered back and said "Scoble's on one of the best teams inside Microsoft." I've landed on a good one, yes, but I totally disagree that it's the best. I've seen tons of teams that are doing interesting things. By the way, he says Visio is a failure? Well, does the Visio team have any webloggers? Does it have an RSS feed? How are you supposed to sell software if you don't have a relationship with your customers?
On the surface it reads like Robert Scoble is claiming that if you don't have a blogger on your team nor an RSS feed then you don't have a relationship with your customers. This is probably the funniest thing I've seen all week.
Scoble's post reminds me of the Cult of the Cluetrain Manifesto article by John Dvorak. It's always unfortunate when people take a bunch of decent ideas and turned them into near-religious beliefs. Being in touch with your customers in an informal and accessible manner is nice but it isn't the only way to communicate with your customers nor is it necessary to make you successful.
I love my iPod. I love my TiVo. I love my Infiniti G35. I love Mike's Hard Lemonade and Bacardi O3. None of these products have official webloggers that I'm aware of nor do they have an RSS feed for their websites that I'm subscribed to. Furthermore, if competing products did it wouldn't change the fact that I'd still be all over the my iPod/TiVo/G35/etc.
Blogging and RSS feeds are nice, but they are the icing on the cake of interacting with and satisfying your customer needs not the end all and be all of them.