In The new way to get your product noticed?, Scoble asserts that “it takes 10 bloggers to talk about you now to get noticed. In a year it might be 20 or even 50”.
So does this mean that when Jorge writes something about gnome or ubuntu, that I should echo it? Would that help gnome, ubuntu, hula, or whatever Jorge thinks is so cool? I would have no problem doing this, I almost always agree with Jorge on what new things are cool and great. Would this really help more people take notice?
I don’t think it would. For one, the only place which I am syndicated, Jorge is also syndicated. Jorge is also syndicated elsewhere. I have a wife and a handful of friends that read a blog occasionally. That is it.
If 8 other just like me echoed the sentiments of Jorge regarding new gnome programs, new ubuntu releases, or whatever, would anyone really notice? I don’t think so.
You cannot create buzz, no matter how hard you try. True buzz comes from a product being really great. Firefox is used as the browser of choice on Windows and Linux. Windows, KDE and Gnome have their own browser offering, but Firefox seems to be what people use.
Incidentally, I made a switch to Opera when 8.0 came out. It now supports XMLHTTPRequest well enough to use gmail, google suggest, google maps, and other AJAX apps. Opera is faster than Firefox, and I’ve really run across very few compatibility problems. NTLM Authentication for use at work is my biggest gripe.
Scoble points out blogline links and technorati links. This is irrelavent because if everyone using a product blogged about it, no one would read blogs, because the noise of “hey I like this” would drown out any good signal. (like my opera tangent) Start.com/3 having 166 links on bloglines is irrelavent because I’ve never seen it (opera chokes), my wife hasn’t seen it, my Dad hasn’t said “hey, have you seen this!”, and I don’t expect them to anytime soon.
Microsoft and its fans seem to be forgetting the rule of 10 times. Google was 10 times better than alternative search engines when it hit the internet. It has also gotten progressively better. MSN and others who compete with google have been so busy chasing google, that they are forgetting that the target should be 10 times better than google.
10 times better than google is so unimaginable that short of a nural implant to find what information I didn’t know I wanted yet and have it waiting for me when I do want it, I do not think 10 times google is possible.
Ok, so 10 times may be a bit much, but 2 times would be good. Apple’s iPod and iLife are at least 2 times as good as Microsoft’s offerings. Windows folks may point out Google’s Picasa, but I’ll counter that it isn’t there because of the integrated nature of iLife’s suite. iPhoto isn’t just iPhoto, but it gets audio from iTunes, and can be use from iMovie.
The one thing I do think Microsoft is doing better than anyone else is making developer tools. Visual Studio and the .NET platform are the best in their field. Yes, probably twice as good as the competition. When will Windows Media player be twice as good as iTunes? I cannot even imagine that.
word++ There is only a small # of people that read my blog – and I’m related to most of them. They pretty much do what I say in the computer realm, so my bias will passed on to them regardless of if I blog it. For me blogging is just a way to stay sane in Iraq.