There’s a difference between “eat your own dog food” and “be blindly stupid”. I never liked that term anyway. I’d rather “eat my own cooking”. Why does it have to be “dog food”?
Anyway.
The Scobleizer has an entry on his blg about how he’s a bad parent and a bad evangelist for Microsoft because his son has an iBook, an iPod and wears Apple T-shirts. Of course, Robert’s brother-in-law works for Apple on the Mac team. Patrick Scoble says his iPod is “cooler”.
This stink comes from Steve Ballmer claiming that his kids are not allowed to have iPods and are not permitted to use Google. Does Ballmer have net-nanny blocking the google URL? Does “google” rank up there with other rude words? How deep does the “don’t use competitors products” go?
Admittedly it’s different for the likes of us. We’re a small company with half a dozen product ideas in the pipeline. In most cases we’re not using a competing product because …well… we’re writing the ones we need. If there was a competing product, we’d use it! Probably.
When you’re a company the size of Microsoft with fingers in every pie and the pies have to be worth $100 million before you’ll even consider dipping in, then the stakes must be a lot higher. When you’re trying to get a foothold in “search”, then brainwashing everyone you meet into using your products must be important (I’m not sure I’d be the same with children). When you’re losing the portable music player market as badly as Microsoft is, then I guess you have to ensure that none of your hard-earned goes into bolstering the competition. I wonder if Ryoji Chubachi uses an iPod?
Now that would be funny.