Can We Trust Microsoft with Claimspace?

Ted points to Claimspace, a service I had never heard of but that looks compelling to me as someone deeply involved in “community management”. He also brings up a good point. Will people trust Microsoft with this data? As it’s due out in June (although a release that lets you xClaim an arbitrary URI won’t be released for 6-8 weeks after that), we’ll soon see. This is another indicator, though, of the position that Microsoft has gotten themselves into after many years of predatory and abusive behavior. Ideas that are very very good in some cases just aren’t doable by Microsoft anymore. There are a couple initiatives that I can think of that in my opinion were both phenomenally planned and excellently executed by Microsoft but failed miserably because of the trust issue many people have (even outside the Open Source realm) with MSFT. Many people within the company are diligently trying to change this. I see it at conferences all the time. Really smart Microsofties doing really interesting things. People who clearly get it. Try as they might, I don’t think many of the perceptions people have will change until there is a fundamental shift up top. Until that happens, what I wonder is how many of these really smart people will continue to toil given the current circumstances. Not an answerable question, of course, but Microsoft is at a very interesting crossroads right now. People forget just how much IBM was hated in the past (and not even that distant a past). So… what will people think of Microsoft in 5 or 10 years?

–jeremy