A note to Robert Scoble: I know it’s the evangelist thing to do to talk up announcements (early morning ones at that!) but maybe that’s not the best approach. Maybe a better approach is to let announcements and releases speak for themselves, ie underpromise, overdeliver. In the blogosphere, announcements and releases speak for themselves (and then some!) and all you do by over-hyping things is set yourself up for a fall, especially when you are Mr. Microsoft. But the bigger thing here is that hype like this makes it sound like you’re trying too hard, like you need other people’s confirmation of your ideas. What a company really needs to be successful is a strong internal compass pointing the way and with this, I believe, evangelism becomes the human voices to communicate what the compass is saying (yes, it’s a talking compass :)). I had a similar feeling about the hype around the Microsoft RSS announcement made at Gnomedex. When people figure stuff out why something is meaningful on their own, they understand it a lot better and you can create self-propagating evangelism/buzz. But anyhow, we’ll see what the response is like to the big announcement on Monday.
And, as an aside, is it just me or does a 6am PDT announcement seem nuts? I know, I know, it’s probably so that the news coincides with the opening of the stock market, but I’m assuming the buzz that you’re trying to generate here isn’t buzz on wall street. Steve says press releases are dead but I’m not even going that far. I’m just saying that when you’re making an announcement that you want people in the tech world to get excited about, 6am might not be an ideal time.