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Microsoft and the absence of bloggers

  • Artikel

Dylan talks about some of the things he discovered during his recent visit to Redmond. Among the things he found out were that none of his friends at Microsoft blogged, had heard of Scoble or used RSS aggregators. This doesn't surprise me. I talk to colleagues often about blogging and most aren't aware of it at all, let alone thought about the longer-term implications of it to customers. However, I've googled "Oracle blogs" and "IBM blogs" and "Webmethods blogs" and come up with very little as well. We may only have 300 bloggers, but I think we are still way ahead of the curve in terms of corporate blogging. Am I wrong on this?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    I'm not sure if we have more bloggers (or a higher blogger-per-employee ratio) than other large companies, or it's just that our bloggers get written up more frequently or that certain ones of our bloggers are highly visible and help raise the visibility of others.

    I tried to find any blog from an amazon employee that identified him/herself as such a while back, and was unable to. There are several yahoo bloggers, though:
    http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000671.html
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    Back when I was working for an IBM business partner I was surprised when a new version of WebSphere was released to customers without an extensive BETA program amongst its user community (alteast from where I was standing).

    From what I gather a number of the other large IT vendors don't seem to be as "open" as you guys at Microsoft. Its great for getting mindshare.
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    Or maybe we have to give you more work to fill time as you obviously arn't working enough.

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2004
    We have 14 employee bloggers at Oracle [1], and the count is increasing day-by-day. It's a long road to 300 though :)

    1. http://www.orablogs.com
  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2004
    Brian, that's a great start. Do you have any Oracle bloggers as self-critical as Scoble is of Microsoft?
  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2004
    I think at the moment, there are so few of us, we're all probably being a little bit careful about what we say in case Someone is Watching ;) There's not really an official policy about blogging within Oracle yet (though we have an unofficial one for the JDeveloper team). In terms of evolution, I guess we're several years behind Microsoft in that respect (in terms of blogging only, mind you, don't get me started on database technology ;) ).

    The tone over here on blogs.msdn.com seems a lot more relaxed than orablogs.com. So far, most of our bloggers spend a lot of time educating or promoting various products they work on, and less time musing about random things that take their interest from day to day. It's a pity, because I find the second kind of blog has scope for long term interest. I'm pretty sure this is just a symptom of the small number of bloggers though...

    It'll be interesting to see how it develops in both cases. My brain begins to melt when I visit blogs.msdn.com now. I used to be able to take it all in, but now I'm just scanning through for a few key areas that I'm specifically interested in or watching two or three on syndication... On orablogs, the opposite problem is that there's not enough happening yet.

    Brian