Is it just me, or does this quote from Bill Gates on blogging - as reported by AP - make no sense?
I keep thinking about when am I going to start doing a blog," Gates said. "My rate [of posting] has proven to be irregular so far. When I turn out at least two a month they'll put me online."
So let me get this straight. Gates doesn't have a blog yet because he's been posting irregularly to a blog ... which he doesn't have. Perhaps he's writing an experimental offline blog?
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer offers another account, reporting comments made by Gates to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference:
On weblogs in which Microsoft employees speak their mind: "I'd say overwhelmingly it's good. It does raise lots of questions ... Now you have thousands of spokespeople and being off the cuff is part of the whole charm of the thing."
But he said the only real challenge is with executives who start blogs but don't have time to make relatively frequent posts. Gates said he has so far stayed away from starting his own for that reason.
Perhaps he has been reading some of his employees' blogs. News.com's Microsoft blog suggests some of Microsoft's bloggers are becoming increasingly bold about airing their beefs – for instance Microsophist, who argues that "it is time for the leadership at Microsoft to step down, and blogging will make this happen".
Gates clearly takes blogs seriously - he's just given Engadget an interview. But would getting his own blog help him to reconnect with Microsoft's staff? I'm not sure it would. There are precedents for "boss blogs": Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems' president and chief operating officer), Bob Schultz (General Motors' vice chairman) and several executives at Hewlett Packard. Or even Guardian Unlimited's very own blogging boss.
But it's going to be extremely difficult for someone as high profile as Gates to be honest about what's going on at Microsoft and avoid sounding like a Microsoft PR mouthpiece. As Blogger co-founder Meg Hourihan was quoted as saying in a piece in the Washington Post in March: "I think it's going to be a while before we see actually that real honest transparency in public facing corporate weblogs ... It would be nice if you could find a way to do it so it's not sanitised. Just sticking press releases on the front of the blog just doesn't cut it."
Perhaps Gates needs to talk to Robert Scoble, probably Microsoft's best-known blogger and the author of the very wise corporate weblog manifesto.
