Jon Udell is leaving his job at InfoWorld and joining Microsoft in January.
He may see this as a change of employment, but I believe Microsoft has just acqhired a media brand. I feel certain that no media investment bankers were involved and Infoworld is not getting Microsoft’s first-round selection in next year’s draft of rookie tech-writing stars, but there’s more going on here than a mere change of employment venues. This is nothing new in business — stars get paid well no matter what industry. However, it’s a phenomena worth noting — and further consideration.
I also see Jon’s change of jobs in another context: He’s a superstar who works for a business-to-business media company moving over to a marketing company that realizes it’s in the media business. (Granted, Microsoft realized this a long time ago.) Back in April, I applauded Folio: magazine’s wisdom for naming Jon one of the most influential people in the magazine industry and noted why I’m a big fan. Jon explains (in his interview with himself) that he no longer wants to merely have an audience of Alpha geeks (translation: merely speak to a business audience), but would like to explain what’s going on to regular people, as well. By the way, I think that’s good and I think Jon Udell is uniquely qualified to explain the complex to the non-technical — indeed, I’m example A that he can. (Fortunately, he’ll still be doing the the alpha-geek stuff also.) I don’t know Jon, but I’ve learned a lot from him. I wish him the best and look forward to updating my RSS feed of his insights, from wherever they may come.
Prediction: In the future, agents and investment bankers will become involved when high profile bloggers change jobs. (I and others have made this prediction before, so it’s not new.)
Clarification on the title of this post: Actually, my favorite blogger who works at Microsoft will continue to be someone whose blog is an indie project.
Update: Due to the Techmeme’ing (current page version) of this post, it’s enjoying some rather robust traffic. For the record, the word I used, acqhire, was not a typo. I’ve been trying to turn it into a buzzword for a long time.
December 8th, 2006 at 10:15 am
[…] by: newtelligence dasBlog 1.8.5223.1 Sign In Friday, 08 December 2006 Jon Udell is leaving InfoWorld and Joining My Team At Microsoft http://www.scripting.com/2006/12/08.html#When:7:37:52AMYou know those secrets that you just wantto tell everyone about, but can’t? I’ve had one of those for the last couple of months. I guess it was back in October my good friend Mr. John Montgomery sent me a note saying that I really needed to get to know Jon Udell better. From there a series of wonderful emails, phone conversations and face to face discussions occured on a Redmond trip to meet the team. Jon and I worked through what it would mean/take for him to come and work at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago the deal became official. Jon announced this morning on his InfoWorld blog that he is joining my team as a full-time employee of Microsoft. In Jon’s new role he’ll be creating screencasts, podcasts and conducting interviews for Channels 9 and 10. If you’ve never heard a Jon Udell podcast before or viewed one of his screencasts, you really need to. You are in for a treat. It is exciting. John has a fresh take on so many things and that combined with his long time industry experience will be so valuable to us in Evangelism. Jon is a natural story teller, I find that I don’t want our conversations to end when we get on the phone so I can’t wait to see what he’ll do once he’s on fulltime. Jon’s taking a brief break and will be joining us in the New Year. Once he’s on board we’ll post an interview and announce the URL where you’ll find his content over on http://www.on10.net Tracking coverage: Rex HammockTechMemeDave Winer technorati tags: channel+9, 10, evangelism+network, jon+udell 12/08/2006 07:51:53 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) Comments [0] […]
December 8th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
[…] Jon Udell has left InfoWorld and will become a zealot for Microsoft as of January 2007. To hear Udell’s thoughts on his transition, you can listen to his interview. Highlights of the podcast include when Odell was asked whether or not he would be the next Robert Scoble. Diplomatically reassuring the legions of his fans out there: I’ll continue to be a channel for alpha geeks. […]
December 9th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
[…] UPDATE: Scoble’s Take. Rex Hammock’s Take. […]
December 10th, 2006 at 2:46 am
[…] Yes, Rex, Microsoft just acquired a superstar media brand. […]