JaaG and I sat down with Rory Blyth today in my office to talk Channel 9 stuff. We are thinking about doing some Channel 9 stuff and maybe some similar stuff for Convergence 2007 in San Diego.

Quick Tangent: While waiting for Rory (he got lost ... which is very common as my building and office is very hard to find - I'm literally going to have to get a map made up) - JaaG was asking me about not having comments on my blog. His tone implied some kind of Social Computing Heresy (a tone I've heard from Alex and Mark more than once). My response was simple: I publish my work email, personal email and personal IM. Firstly it cuts down the turd ratio. When people contact me (and it's a reasonable rate) - it is a 1:1 connection. Partners and Customer typically ask CRM questions (along with the occasional cocktail recipe advice) and I'm not sure they want to always ask questions in a public forum.

I asked the usual - "So you know about Microsoft CRM right?". Rory's reply is worth repeating - well at least paraphrasing: "Its some acquired company that does inventory, financials or something...".

Typical. Not Rory's fault - it's the Dynamics thing. People not familiar with the product assume we are part of the whole Dynamics NAV, GP, SL, AX stuff. All that ERP stuff. It gets even more confusing when I explain that we work for the Office Business Platform and it's just our marketing team which live in Dynamics. Much like the Office Small Business Accounting whose marketing team is in Office and their dev team in Dynamics. Oh - the joy of bizarre org structures!

I gave him the quick thirty second spiel about why our product is cool (from a developer's perspective) and he was shocked: "Why haven't I heard about this!?!".

Exactly.

I'm not sure what I want to do with Channel 9. Maybe find a bunch of crazy characters from the team and tell our story. I'm not sure I'll volunteer for one myself. Rory suggested that interesting people made for the best video studies. I'm not sure I'm that interesting (although I am that arrogant).

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