Is Microsoft People-Ready?

It's interesting that the brouhaha over Microsoft's "people-ready" campaign involving top bloggers mouthing incomprehensible sound-bites about "people-readiness" has concentrated on castigating the bloggers involved. But what I find interesting is the light it throws on Microsoft.

The whole campaign is just so maladroit: using blogger stars in this way shows that the company simply has no idea of how the blogosphere - glorified echo-chamber that it so often is - works. This crescendo of self-righteousness on the part of other bloggers was inevitable: it's not like this kind of collective breast-beating hasn't happened before.

Which goes to show that in its dealings with this quintessentially people-centric medium, Microsoft is, to coin a phrase, deeply "people-unready".