Saving Private Scoble

"He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb." - Captain Miller about what Private James Francis Ryan would need to do to make the mission to save him worthwhile.

A star was born this weekend. As Dan Farber writes Scoble's announcement he was leaving Microsoft trumped even the World Cup. I can testify - my early post Saturday and Scoble's mention of my blog yesterday has brought me over 2,000 page views in the last day or so. And I am several time zones removed from the epicenter that he is. WSJ , Reuters,  hundreds of blogs wrote about him on a Sunday, no less.

But Scoble did not write any code in Microsoft products. Hardly any corporate CIO knows him. So what's the big deal, as Paul Kedrosky asks? Nick Carr worries about letting a blogger become the face of a company.

The big deal is 2 years ago, few of us knew we could have our own affordable publishing platform and that we did not have to depend on just media and analysts for perspectives. The big deal is even today corporations have dumb rules on communications - while they build contingency plans and chaos theory in most business decisions, they pretend their messages can be impeccably controlled. Tech vendors, in particular, are reluctant to acknowledge the changing influence game.  The big deal is corporations have built call centers and templatized email on their sites to put distance and walls between their executives and their customers.

Scoble, in many ways through his book and his blog, challenged our thinking in so many of these areas. Indeed, Bill Gates is supposed to have told a group of customer CEOs last month to start their own corporate blogs in line with Microsoft's.

To Microsoft's credit they gave Scoble a lot of rope. Not sure an Oracle, an IBM or a CA ever would have. But Microsoft is going through a gut wrenching time and subtly or not so subtly did constrain Scoble. In an interview yesterday Scoble said "When you start breaking the rules, you better know you are breaking the rules.''  He will not have a huge budget in a start up, but he will not have too many rules either and should keep pioneering.

No, I do not expect Scoble to cure cancer. But if he can keep turning on some more light bulbs across corporations, particularly in tech, he will have "earned it" as Captain Miller asks of Ryan at the end of the movie.