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Comment by TrevorJ | Hacker News Reader

The point this article seems to be missing is, it was his personal opinion about something he was also involved in professionally. He didn't say something unpopular about fly fishing, or jenga, he was stating his opinion about products and services that the public assumes he has a hand in designing. Not only that, but he was fairly abrasive in the way he chose to respond to backlash. Telling people to 'deal with it' just isn't a smart way to go about it when you are (rightly or wrongly) seen as speaking for a company.

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Agreed. To me this is a story of lack of professional common sense. When this guy spoke, he spoke as someone with (implied) inside knowledge of both his employer and his industry.

He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

Put another way, if he had said something that had affected stock price, he would probably face criminal charges.

That's reason enough to shut the heck up, bite his lip, and let the internet be wrong. All of us with inside knowledge about our employers (specially if our employer is a public company) do that routinely.

I hope that Reg FD will be fixed to consider Twitter as "fair disclosure".

> He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

All in under 140 characters?

> > He should have either stressed he did not have inside knowledge and this was his personal opinion, or he should have said nothing. The problem with the first option is that he did have inside knowledge.

> All in under 140 characters?

Well, the second options works well in under 140 characters (since it takes exactly 0 characters), and the first option (as noted in the grandparent post) has problems unrelated to character limits, so, yes, "all in under 140 characters."

Saying nothing is really easy with 140 characters. Anybody should be able to manage that. ;)

Sure, he could have easily inserted "I am not speaking for Microsoft".

Just one tweet saying that before the stream of stupidity would have made things a lot better, though he probably shouldn't have commented on the situation at all on an account identified as belonging to a Microsoft employee and he especially shouldn't have been such a huge jerk in his responses (eg. his why would I live there? comment, etc).

In the grand scheme of things, I think he's probably getting dumped on a bit too much and is taking some flack for becoming the public face for a poor decision (always-on console) that I believe Microsoft as a company fully intended to deliver on(though they may attempt to change course on this if possible given the backlash). But he really did show some poor judgement throughout the whole thing.

They used to say: "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Equally important: "if you can't say something the right way within the constraints of twitter, then don't say anything at all."

It's not even the first time that somebody has gotten themselves into high-profile trouble for insulting a place where a customer lives on Twitter, either.

>Much has been made of Ketchum vp James Andrews, who became an international embarrassment to Ketchum when he used his Twitter account to insult Memphis, the hometown of client Fedex, the morning before he was to meet with them there. The tweet was copied to Fedex's marketing management, and a predictable round of corporate apologizing followed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42740256/worst-twitte...

Adam M. Smith was fired http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/08/02/totally-heterosex... for expression that wasn't work related.

Yea, but that wasn't just expressing an opinion, that was harassing someone. It's not like he just posted his opinion about Chick-fil-a on his facebook or twitter.

Even more importantly, he probably violated his NDA by indirectly revealing facts about the next generation xbox (which has not been announced officially in any manner) which are still supposed to be secret. Being an asshat certainly didn't help his case, I'd imagine.

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