« Ultimate ABCs and XYZs, an example | Main | In defense of simplicity »

May 23, 2004

Gates/MSFT late to the blogging party?

Joi Ito's Web: Bill Gates talks about blogging Joi Ito's blog is one of a lot of discussions arising from Billg's recent little tutorial on blogging at his big CEO summit (see full transcript, and see Reuters story). One perspective, that a friend just posed to me: isn't Gates late to the party? I wonder. Microsoft is often late to the party, and those have usually been its biggest successes (word processing, spreadsheets, browsers). To mangle metaphors nicely: fast followers who are late to the party often make better dragracers because they are still sober while the other guys are getting drunk on their early success. Heck, Ford was late to the sports car party and they created the ultimate dragracer for the masses. The mustang. Now Joi wonders whether this means that the whole blogging thing is going to turn into another war/dragrace between Google/Atom and Microsoft/RSS. bloggermsft.jpg Robert Scoble at Microsoft thinks not. But it still leaves you wondering. Meanwhile, Hugh Hacleod at gapingvoid seems just fine with all this. He basically feels like getting a big gorrilla like MSFT in there indicates that blogging and blog publishing tools are going mainstream. And that's OK. Especailly if it means he gets more free space to publish and push sales of his blogcards. For some further thought on this topic check out: - Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor/Jupiter Research. He thinks Billg gets it. That he understand blogging as outside the Windows OS world and in need of bringing in. - Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch. Sees Gates as doing a nice job of being a blogging spokesperson for normal business people. (more from her on other MSFT blogging thoughts, announcements, etc.) - Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer, also has been noting Microsoft's Blog March. Whatever your perspective, this will be interesting to watch.

Posted by johnza at May 23, 2004 05:35 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.geekfishing.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/957

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?