Caliban Darklock wrote this terribly early in the morning:
I’m closing up on the end of my second full week at Microsoft, and yesterday I received word that a fellow contractor was fired for releasing confidential information.
Apparently, he was trying to be honest and open and helpful. He was telling people on a mobile devices forum how great a device in testing was, and how they all needed to get one, and what a wonderful job Microsoft’s testing department was doing with finding and fixing bugs. He even sent them pictures of the device in question, and told them just how minor and easily fixed the most recent bug reports were. What a nice guy.
Too bad he was violating confidentiality. Most people just plain don’t get it. What’s the big deal?, they say. It’s only a picture of a mobile device.
That’s as may be, it’s a picture of a mobile device from a specific company which is at a specific stage of development. See, when a device is in the early stages of development, it looks like a circuit board with cables plugged into it. It’s not until late in the development process that it starts to look like a real mobile device you can use, so when the picture looks like a final product, it very nearly is a final product. And if you understand your competition, you know how late in the cycle each company tends to start getting their products to look snazzy - even to the point of looking at the device and accurately predicting the release date to within a week or two.
What constantly eludes people about marketing is that doing and saying nothing is itself a marketing strategy. When a company decides to keep a new product quiet until it actually hits shelves, they’re planning a specific scenario. If you come out and start blabbing about whatever you want, you screw that up. So what did you cost that company? Well, you cost them the price of the marketing campaign itself, which is now ruined. You cost them whatever difference in sales results from your screwup of the campaign. And you also cost them all the time and effort they spent keeping everything secret. For a major mobile device, that can be a nine-digit question.
Regardless of your personal beliefs about what makes the best marketing campaign for the device, you’re not their marketing department. They didn’t hire you to market their device. Shut up and let the people they did hire do the job.
Especially when you have a confidentiality agreement that says you lose your job if you say the wrong thing. Just STFU about it. Nobody knows better than I do how annoying it is when everyone on some forum thinks you’re a loser and all you have to do is say “I know things”. What you have to remember is that nobody on that forum really cares what you know. If they don’t like you, they don’t like you. Go elsewhere.
Filed under: Notices
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