Yesterday was the first anniversary of my full-time employment at Microsoft.
I’ve been hesitant, before today, to put that fact in print, because I wasn’t sure how the company would take my blogging. But internal conversations around how we engage our customers on line and offline have convinced me that it would be dishonest to our customers not to publicly disclose my employment.
What does that mean about my blogging? When I write about RSS, for instance, does that mean I speak for Microsoft? No, and if I think I’m getting close to a core area of the company in a post I’ll add an official disclaimer.
As for what I do at Microsoft, I am not now, nor have I ever been, working on one of the core software products at Microsoft. I work on Microsoft.com, which is to an ex-consultant like myself sometimes more interesting, because we are an internal customer for all of Microsoft’s server software, usually well before it actually hits the street. My title is Lead Product Manager, but what I mostly do is to study online customer behavior. My group reports up to Eric Rudder, another Microsoft blogger.
To anyone who may be caught off guard by this admission: I’m sorry, and if you want to discuss it with me on or off line, please feel free to contact me. I hope that the only change in my posting will be that I will be able to be more open. I plan to continue to write about the same set of topics, and will add Microsoft-specific notes to the mix where appropriate.