Louis' Ramblings

Thoughts on blogging

Eric posted a very interesting story, but the last comment is what I want to talk about:

(On a related note, this is one reason not to have a publicly available list of Apple bloggers. I wonder how many people bulk-mail all of the known Microsoft bloggers.)

[Eric's Weblog]

Ever since I saw the list of Microsoft bloggers I have been amazed there is no list of Apple bloggers. Don't get me wrong, I am really, really glad there is not. I know several dozen people at Apple who blog. I often link to a friend's blog. And since I have many friends who work for Apple there is this sort of incidental community. But, despite the fact that sometimes work can be quite consuming, we all do more than just work. In fact, while very few people hide that they work for Apple, very few people decide to say much about their jobs. Its just generally not a good idea, since Apple is a pretty secretive company. Its also a pretty large, and very diverse company. That means, most of us are not directly involved with most products. Let me tell a little story.

I was at a BANG meeting. Since BANG actually meets on Apple's campus, there often tend to be quite a few Apple employees in attendance. After the meeting I was introduced to someone, who had some questions about some particular issues with his University's setup. I said I wasn't really involved with the area of the system he was having issues with, and that I didn't know of anyway to solve his issues, but that he should ask his University contact and that they could probably either point him towards a solution, or make a feature request. He immediately started railing at me "How does Apple expect to be taken seriously in the UNIX market with this!?!" At this point I kind of wanted to end the conversation as quickly as possible, so again I said he should make a feature request through whatever his preferred channels were. He said that he was telling me. I commented that I was just an engineer, and if he wanted the feature he would need to make a real feature request through some formal channel, and if enough people asked for it some engineering would probably be allocated to it. He looked at me somewhat incredulously. He was honestly shocked that I had no direct influence on the feature that he thought was so important. At that point he realized it didn't matter whether or not I agreed with him, because I was in no position to decide to work on his issue. The problem is that this is a very common situation. When people find out I work for Apple, often they not only assume I am involved with whatever product they are interested in, they are also immediately certain that I have some sort of influence over it, and that if they can convince me that their right they'll get their particular issue addressed.

I have this feeling that if there was a well known list of Apple bloggers, the situation would probably be a lot worse.