Mini-Microsoft is pretty controversial while being wildly popular with Microsoft employees and enthusiasts. Heck, he was even interviewed by Business Week last September (article here). I would have to say that you've garnered a wee bit of popularity if you're the subject of a Business Week article. Anyway, Mini's quest is for a leaner, meaner Microsoft and he's quite passionate about the do's & don'ts we employees see around here every single day.

In response to Mini-Microsoft, Robert Scoble (Microsoft evangelist extraordinaire) has put together a long, but very interesting essay about how to "shut down Mini-Microsoft" (essay here). He's not rallying the corporate police to seek out and destroy Mini, but rather espousing ways in which we can resolve the issues that Mini rants about.

Here, here Robert! Although it reminds me somewhat of Jerry Maguire's "why do we work this way" essay written in the wee hours and distributed to everyone in the office the very next morning, I like it. A lot!

• A terabyte of space for everyone. I love FolderShare, but dude, sign me up!
• Top-of-the-line machine with dual monitors running Vista for every single employee. I have dual monitors and I must agree...they increased my productivity significantly!
• Public compensation change logs. My first reaction to this is that I like the transparency, but I'll have to give it some more thought.
• Remove corporate speed bumps. Agreed.
• Force marketers to explain there decisions in public. Hell yeah. Accountability. I like most of our code names and it really irritates me when we screw them up for the final products (Whistler was much better than Windows Server 2003).

Go read the entire essay. It's quite interesting.

~tod

tags: microsoft mini+microsoft