The Microsoft-Google spy affair

Oh, I admit the title sounds a tad dramatic, but in effect what I’m blogging here concerns revealing internal information, so if you add a mental wink the title is fairly appropriate. The object of controversy (or at least, a lot of interest) is this blog post by an anonymous Microsoft employee (via Heather). In it, a Microsoft recruiter interviews someone who previously worked for Google and asks about his experiences there. While the interviewer chose to share the text with other Microsofties through internal channels, the (anonymous) blogger decided go a step further and publicly post it in Just Say No To Google, which is apparently a one-shot blog.

As several of the many commentators have noted, the blogger is critical (or even hostile) of Google in a way that isn’t really reflected by the interview. Even his assertion that Google is not transparent is hardly supported by the interview - instead it effectively says that Google may be more attractive to some people and Microsoft more attractive to others, depending on your priorities and lifestyle (Heather echoes this in the last paragraph of her very interesting and detailed commentary).

While it is tempting for companies to file this under “how blogging can reveal your trade secrets”, that would be inaccurate, because this isn’t really blogging in the strictest sense. The anonymous Microsoftie has used the one-shot blog as a platform to publish something that someone else has written, though this may not be immediately transparent to readers. He could have published it using a different tool, but the simplicity and anonymity of a hosted blog made it the natural choice. It is exceedingly likely that in the future many earth-shattering revelations (which the “insider” information about Google’s cafeteria is surely not) will be made via blogs in this way, since there is hardly an easier way to reveal something you want to see revealed while remaining anonymous.