Attention All Microsoft Employees: Foolproof Strategy for Instant Career Advancement

It's a gray and wet Redmond day. You're sitting in your office staring at the wall. You ponder, is promotion possible? Can I make more money? Can my career go big time here at Microsoft?

You say to yourself: I know!!! I need some brilliant idea to bring to my boss so he looks brilliant and gets promoted. I look and feel brilliant so I get promoted, and anyone that reports to me is brilliant and get promoted too. Yes, in one move you benefit an entire food chain of employees.

How?

Some whiz kid finally realizes that Microsoft needs to buy NewsGator and integrate it into their Office product line. This individual will march off immediately to their boss and convince them to get the ball rolling. Their boss will go to their boss, and that boss goes to their boss and so on. The rest is history ….. (I love happy endings.)

I've had a tremendous amount of e-mail over the last few days since my post titled NewsGator 2.0: Blows My Mind!.

I'm going to repeat a prediction I made in that post. If you missed it the first time, stop what you're doing. Read it again! Meditate on it! If you don't get it, start over and read it again until you do.

Prediction: in a few years everyone will read what interest them through news aggregators and the browser will simply be a tool used for search.

In a nutshell, everyone agrees the idea of aggregating information into Outlook that is relevant to them has had significant impact. It's not just about RSS hype. It's the thought that the user has control over information that interests them. It comes into Outlook where they already spend a great deal of their time. All of Outlook's great whizbang viewing features kick in. My personal favorite is the "Unread Mail" view in Outlook 2003 that groups all new RSS posts by blogger and other personal e-mail.

One final thought and I may blog on this later. I think the Newsgator's strategy of providing a device neutral and centralized blog aggregator experience is genius. Why? If Microsoft doesn't buy NewsGator, they are likely to put the NewsGator Outlook Add-in out of business by the next release. It's one of those sad ironies. It may be that NewsGators foray into user innovation has just started and its days may be numbered.