Bill Gates highlights the advantages of blogging to CEOs.
Steve Rubel asks: Does this mean Microsoft is now on the blogging warpath? He continues:
“Gates’ remarks were reminiscent of the infamous Pearl Harbor Day email he sent to his troops nearly a decade ago, in which he “declared war” on the then nascent World Wide Web. At that time, few of us were on the Web. It was still the realm of techies, much like Weblogs and RSS today.”
Could be. In fact, I hope Microsoft does step in. I see the competition as a good thing.
First, I hope this continues to encourage Microsoft bloggers. Maybe even Bill Gates himself. I know I’d subscribe to his feed.
I hope Microsoft steps in with a full-fledged blogging service. Blogger doesn’t do it for me. And I think hosted services are going to become the most successful model for combating comment spam–something which can drive me to another product.
I’d also like to see some thick-client blogger apps. I’m guessing these won’t come from Microsoft, but hopefully the tools to build them will.
There are some areas where the blogging model could help other products, such as FrontPage. To me, blogging illustrates the power of content management systems. Someone needs to cross the powerhouse UIs of FrontPage- and Dreamweaver-caliber products with the content simplicity of PostNuke, Blogger, and other “content management systems.”
Almost every company that I’ve worked with–whether large or small–seems to stumble at managing their web-based content. It’s too complex, so they have these extra layers of control and management when deploying content to their websites. It’s too bad. At the user level there isn’t much to it: “I have some text in a Word document listing some upcoming roadshow events. How come I can’t simply add them to an existing block on a page?” Blogging tools prove that when something is easy, people use them. Although, web page design tools are powerful, competitively, the simplicity of blogging tools have the edge. People can focus on what they are really trying to do: communicate rather than design. (At least that’s the case for most of us.)
And then there’s the issue of RSS. Here again, blogging has shown the way with RSS. The ability to create, manage and track RSS feeds on “commercial websites” from within FrontPage needs to be built in.
Blogging can reach into other products too. What about a “Publish document to Blog” API accessible to all products? Rather than everyone rolling their own XML-RPC/SOAP or whatever blogging API, how about Microsoft providing an API? Can you guess what advantage this would give to Windows-based developers?
Blogging is getting more and more interesting.