Dodging Thought Leaders

At the Northern Voice party I was talking with Scoble about the Google “smart-tags”-redux mini-scandal. He was pointing out once again that Google doesn’t have to play by the rules that govern Microsoft. (For how long, I wonder?) I remarked that I hadn’t heard about any first-hand experiences since few people I work with live on Windows. But Lauren was there and I’d sent her a pointer to the Google thing, so I asked her what she thought. “How would I know?”, she said, “It’s IE-only.” The proportion of thought leaders who use IE on Windows is trending to zero. But you’d have to be really paranoid—more than me, even—to suspect Google of a deliberate dodge. Whatever; releasing anything IE-only generally sucks.