The Seattle Times reports that Bill Gates may soon start walking his talk and start blogging, following his promotion of the use of blogging and RSS for business during his keynote at the annual Microsoft CEO Summit last month. If he starts his own blog, he would be joining the ranks of [at least] hundreds of other Microsoft bloggers; interestingly, Scobleizer, one of the most widely read Microsoft bloggers, does not have any reference to this story. Perhaps the Seattle Times article is a bit premature — it includes a qualifier from a Microsoft spokesman about “time permitting”, and as has been recently pointed out, blogging can be time consuming.
I remember hearing a story a few years ago about Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy promoting the use of open online calendars (i.e., making calendar entries publicly viewable, at least within the firm) throughout Sun, and yet keeping his own online calendar private … which at the time made me wonder when McNealy would “get over” privacy. I don’t know if the McNealy story is fact or fiction, but I do find it heartening whenever a CEO demonstrates a dimension of integrity by following his or her own precepts (I’ve also heard that Craig Barrett‘s “office” is a standard-sized cubicle at Intel, but have not yet been able to independently verify this). If Gates does start blogging, I wonder who will be on his blogroll …
(Thanks, Suzi)