Charles Arthur: "What’s a guy gotta do to get a little Scoblejuice around here?"

My favorite new question for product teams at Microsoft: what is your philosophy?

It's amazing what weaknesses in a product team's vision that question gets at.

What philosophy drives you? Drives your team? Drives your decisions?

When someone offers you $10 million to go against your philosophy, do you do it?

Do you think no one has offered Google big bucks to put color advertising on their search engine? But so far they've stayed with text-only advertising.

Translation: Google has a philosophy.

What's MSN's philosophy? What's Longhorn's philosophy? What's the Tablet PC's philosophy? What is Visual Studio's philosophy? What's Internet Explorer's? Xbox's? Sharepoint's? Exchange's? Office's? Media Center's? SmartPhone's? CRM's? MapPoint's? Flight Simulator's? SQL Server's? Windows?

That's what I'm wondering. How about you?

WhatIsNew.com posted a press release about a new Fujitsu Tablet PC. Lora, can you just tell us three things about any new Tablet PC?

1) Does it have resolution higher than 1024x768?

2) Does the battery really last longer than four hours? (I want one that can go about seven hours).

3) Is there something that makes the unit under discussion different? (For instance, does it have built in DVD since none of the tablets I've seen have one built in).

Thanks!

Lots of podcasting news surging through the blogosphere.

First, my boss, Lenn Pryor, hooked up with Phillip Torrone over on Engadget weblog and are doing their own podcast. Today they posted "How to get Podcasts and also make your own."

Second, Howard Greenstein posted "How to 'receive' Podcasts if you don't use an iPod."

Adam Curry mentioned me in today's Daily Source Code Podcast.

Dave Winer said some really nice things about me in his coffee notes (about 30 minutes into the Podcast).

Mick Stanic noted that I "Scobleized" him on the Gillmor Gang.

By the way, over the weekend Jason Calacanis told me that Engadget is the most trafficed weblog with about 250,000 visits per day. Jason is the guy who owns Weblogsinc.com, which hosts Engadget.

Gnomedex rocked.

My favorites? Steve Wozniak (did you see the picture I posted to my photoblog?)

Wil Wheaton was simply inspiring. He signed my Tablet PC. I gave him a demo. Looks like he was talked into doing full text feeds too. Awesome.

Wil is one of those guys I needed to see perform to really get his blog -- I never was really into his style before, but now I get it (he was a TV star on Star Trek Next Generation when he was a kid and he now writes about his inner conflicts as he goes through life). At one point when he was speaking I turned away and looked at the audience to guage reactions and everyone was totally rapt in attention. Hard to do when you have 300 geeks with WiFi and laptops. I found myself tearing up, both in agreement and in shared pain over some of his experiences.

The sessions will be put up slowly over the next few weeks at ITConversations.com. I'll let you know when new sessions are up for you to listen to (the Gillmor Gang that was filmed live there is the first one).

Reminder, come to the geek dinner tonight in Bellevue, WA. Anita Rowland has the details. Lots of fun people will be there.

We'll have more geek dinners soon. Next Monday evening, for instance, Mike Kolitz, Microsoft MVP for Windows Setup/Deployment, and Bob Stein of ActiveWin, will be special guests at the geek dinner on 10/11 at 6:30 p.m.

On the 19th I'm planning to come down to Portland for a geek dinner there too.

I'm not the only one doing geek dinners, though. I've been putting other geek dinner announcements on my linkblog.

Evan Williams leaves Google. He's the guy who co-founded Pyra, the company that made Blogger. Good luck Evan with the next part of your life's journey!

What is it with the execs lately? Here's another controversy swirling through the blogosphere. Sun Microsystems' chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, struck a raw nerve at HP with his weblog.

Here's my philosophy: only say nice things about your competitors. It drives them nuts. At UserLand we went even further. We said nasty things about ourselves. My favorite motto from a Dave Winer-run company was "we make shitty software with bugs."

Saying nasty things about yourself communicates that you have a sense of humor and that you know you have a lot of work ahead.

Saying nasty things about your competitors just motivates them. I know some companies that have nasty quotes from their competitors' executives on posters in the hallways. Sometimes even with pictures. It's a very effective motivating technique.

Think about it, isn't it powerful to say nice things about your competitors? Doesn't that communicate that you are operating from a position of strength?

So, tell me why I'm full of it. Heh.

Congrats to Jeff Sandquist, friend and coworker, who has moved on from Channel 9 to form a new evangelism group for developers at Microsoft (he tells me he's hiring too!)

The Gillmor Gang audio show that was recorded live at Gnomedex is now available for you to stick on your MP3-playing device. Don't worry, it's legal.

Chris Pirillo is buying Steve Ballmer an iPod so Ballmer can join the "music stealing" crowd himself. Maybe we can talk Steve into coming onto Channel 9 so we can hand him the iPod and we can have a good chat about this stuff.