On Radical Transparency in Business

The latest issue of Wired has an interesting cover story, The See-Through CEO (and the cover itself was, um, interesting too). The concept is that various technologies, most notably some of the Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, as well as the ubiquity of Google searching and so on, are changing the calculus that companies need to go through when determining what information to keep secret and what information they should share with the public, and most importantly with their customers. I won't try to retell it here... read the article for many fascinating and thought-provoking anecdotes and questions about both the present-day realities and what the future might be like in this area.

Then also check out the article about Microsoft's Channel 9 operation. I've watched several videos from both channel 9 and the newer channel 10, usually on upcoming products (e.g., Windows Home Server). This article is a nice example of how a company can introduce some measure of transparency in ways that are really effective and useful to people, and yet aren't completely zany and liable to get the legal or marketing department up in arms.