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Bill Gates Just Doesn’t Command The Attention Steve Jobs Does

Middle of last week, if you subscribed to Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ email list, you got a missive on security in a connected world. It was semi-long, about 3 1/2 pages, and certainly the sort of intelligent and interesting stuff you’d expect from Gates. Problem is, as Amit Agarwal pointed out, Gates got totally upstaged by his counterpart at his most public competitor.

That same day, Steve Jobs decided it was time for him to release an essay on DRM in the digital music industry, stopping just short of telling the music industry to abolish DRM altogether. It was a bold sorta-statement, and it completely removed any chance of people caring about what Bill Gates had to say. Right now, six days later, Technorati tracks 4,032 links to Steve Jobs essay, and a mere 37 links to Bill Gates (six of which were Amit’s article and copies of it).

Bill, you are about to retire, and lost even more of your power to command an audience. It is getting to be time for you to start a blog. You obviously have something to say, so you need to create a place for people to listen to you. Develop a nice readership, and you won’t be ignored next time. There’s no reason the richest man on earth should have 1/10th the links this blog has!

February 12th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General, Blogs, Corporate | 5 comments
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5 Comments »

  1. I’d subscribe to Gates blog.

    Comment by azz0r | 2/12/2007

  2. I didn’t even know he had a public mailing list? He does? Hmm… I would in fact prefer an RSS feed, which would be easy to do with most blogging tools, indeed ;-)

    I don’t think the fact that noone heard about it was due to the butterfly effect, though. I read several blogs that could easily have pushed this story together with the anti-DRM statement, but didn’t. Why? Because the people giving input to those news sites (the readers of Slashdot and the editors of several other sites) didn’t know about this “missive”. I guess the only way to fix that is to have the mailing list advertised more - like feature it for a week on Microsoft.com. There’s no way it would be ignored as much afterwards.

    *starts looking for mailing list*

    Comment by Tim | 2/12/2007

  3. As a service to anyone reading here… Here is the feed.

    http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/rss.xml

    Comment by Tim | 2/12/2007

  4. Well, when Bill talked about his thoughts on DRM, Mike Arrington had the report on that one: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-on-the-future-of-drm/

    And Technorati reports 426 results. That’s a bit better.

    Comment by Josh | 2/12/2007

  5. That should be ‘links’ not ‘results.’ Sorry.

    Comment by Josh | 2/12/2007

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