NYT article about Eric Rudder... and other Microsoft bloggers

Tomorrow’s New York Times is running an article by Steve Lohr entitled “A Front-Runner at Microsoft, but There’s No Race Yet” (registration required). The article is mostly about Eric Rudder, Senior VP of the Server and Tools division and about five clicks up the org chart from me. Here’s the bit that made me smile:

More than a thousand engineers and product managers in Mr. Rudder's unit have started blogs in the last couple of years to explain what Microsoft is doing and to field comments and criticism from customers and programmers outside the company.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Eric accomplished this partly by starting his own blog – even though it’s still mostly empty. Microsoft is very much a “show me” culture: PMs don’t trust other teams until they see working code, and devs don’t believe it’s safe to blog until their VP starts one. The Channel 9 video probably helps too :) So a big thankyou to Eric for leading the way

And while tracking that down I also discovered that Bill Anderson just resumed blogging yesterday! To compensate for taking three months off, he managed two posts in one lunchtime, updating everyone on the organizational changes in SMS, and talking about some job openings on the team.