Because the blogosphere clearly hasn’t seen enough commentary.

There has been such an outburst of interesting posts on Scoble’s departure from Microsoft, including some of Robert’s most thoughtful and interesting blogging in a long while, that originally I set out to compile a quick list of my favorites. Then I got overwhelmed with the sheer volume, so here are just my thoughts which are no doubt echoed in many other places:

This is a good thing for Scoble, and yes, a loss for Microsoft
I am incredibly happy for Robert taking this plunge – it sounds like the right move at the right time for the right reasons. Dave Winer has a nice post talking about Robert’s style which I feel really captures the fact that Scoble is plainly a pure enthusiast, genuinely interested in people, and loves being involved in the community. He’s also willing to speak his mind, to the point of risking his job. For these reasons he’s been a huge asset to Microsoft (and will be to PodTech), but this is a place that loves it when people grow, and sometimes they grow out of the Mothership. All a good thing in the long run.

Is it a loss for Microsoft? Absolutely, but not how many people are frothing on about. Any time you lose an employee of Scoble’s calibre, it’s a bad thing. And Scoble, more than any one person I can think of, has led the charge towards openness and transparency at this company. His willingness to be a pain in the ass and call crap by its name has been a Godsend for countless other bloggers at the company – he’s given us all the aircover needed to express our own sometimes controversial views. A big thank you to Scoble for that.

But his leaving doesn’t mean Microsoft is going to revert back to the bad old days when we all rejoiced in covering the land in evil while dancing about over the cold bodies of our former competitors (or something like that). In the past few years we have seen a fundamental shift in attitudes by employees, PR, legal, and more importantly executive management. Away from a closed society and towards a spirit of community, openness, and cutting straight through the BS to talk to our customers, fans, and critics.

That is a core shift in values – it isn’t going away simply because one person is leaving. 3000+ other employee bloggers have something to say and are going to keep on saying it. Channel 9 will continue to grow. Initiatives like On10.net will keep launching and refining. Reaching out to the community is a core part of any business group’s plan these days, and that simply will not – can not – change even with the loss of Scoble.

We do lose a singular voice, and there is a risk that we’ll miss out on some great opportunities to show the real (hopefully “good”) side of Microsoft in a lot of places where Scoble was most active. But I have a hunch lots of other employees will happily step up – some of that will happen organically, some deliberately, but it will happen.

Scoble is something of a larger than life personality paradoxically because he is so approachable and down to earth. That will be incredibly hard to replace in the form of a single person. But the changes to the corporate cultture Robert came to embody aren’t going away, and while we likely won’t be able to replace Robert directly, thousands of other employees will keep things going and hopefully keep the ideas of openness and transparency forefront in our “new” way of thinking.

To wrap – a good luck to Robert, and a huge congrats to PodTech. To everyone worrying that this means bad things for the future of Microsoft, pop on over to Channel 9, blogs.msdn.com or blogs.technet.com, or countless other community sites we’re actively involved in, and join in.