Penny Arcade on Microsoft Bloggers
Just wanted to point you to a couple of interesting posts today.
The first was Jerry/"Tycho" of Penny Arcade fame talking about ThreeSpeech (the "unofficial" Sony blog), as well as commenting on Microsoft bloggers in general. As usual, his writing speaks for itself, so I'll just quote the piece referring to Microsoft blogs:
Microsoft's marketing isn't slimy, it's just bad. Inert. The entire platform strategy was designed to secure a leadership position in the next generation, and once they achieved it, they were paralyzed by it. I thought it was rudderless behavior until I realized that they had simply reached their destination and sort of unpacked their things. As for their blogger phalanx which encircles the web, their position as explicit partisans dilutes their message automatically. Unless you are searching for quantifiable facts like release dates or raw platform orthodoxy, their editorial content is understood to emanate from that circle of cursed megaliths in Redmond.
For what it's worth, I'm actually good friends with Jerry (and the rest of the PA crew), and don't take any offense here. I completely agree about the "challenged" attributation of ThreeSpeech opinions. I'm certainly not thrilled with all of our marketing (and frankly, Apple manages to spank us so badly at times that it really, really smarts!) Can't argue that one. But I was somewhat struck by his opinion on corporate bloggers.
I can't argue the fact that simply being employed by a company in an industry you're commenting on is going to have the effect of causing people to suspect bias. And in fact, there's truth to the statement. The simple fact that I can't write about some of the confidential things we're doing removes a huge chunk of topics right off the top. And I'm sure the very nature of working on something you believe in passionately can also tinge a viewpoint. But I can also say that a lot of folks at Microsoft (especially those in the games division) are super-passionate about what we've built and continue to build.
There have been plenty of times that people have sent us feedback (some of it solicited here, in fact). And it's good stuff. You'd be amazed at how often we're already working on identified problems - we're gamers here, it's not like we don't know. Unfortunately, sometimes we just can can't enable certain things. To use one of Jerry's favorite quotes of mine, it's often a "time and space" issue. Sometimes we're able to get to it later, sometimes we never get to it. But I can say that there's a lot of deep, internal soulsearching when we make the tradeoffs on what we build. There's some magical stuff coming down the pipe in the next few years... give us the benefit of the doubt. We tend to deliver on our promises, even if it takes us three versions to get it right. 
One of my coworkers was also struck by Jerry's comments, and he wrote up a heartfelt response. Take a read, and whatever you do, keep up the communication and the comments. (Yes, even you Mr. "Ring of Death and DVD attack" man. ) We're slow sometimes, but each and every one of your comments are heard.