Steve Rubel notes the good press Microsoft has been getting as a result of embracing the blog as a medium for it's internal and often external communication.

The corporate vice president of developer and platform evangelism, Sanjay Parthasarathy, is responsible for making sure that third-party software developers bond with Microsoft in new and unique ways. VARBusiness has an article praising his ways...

And, finally, he thinks he has come up with a plan to reach out to this community in a way that will appeal to even the most die-hard anti-Microsoft zealots: blogging, something an estimated 800 Microsoft employees are doing with the company's blessing. That's up eightfold in just a year.

I regularly read the Scobleizer, a blog by Robert Scoble. I find it useful, occassionally entertaining and almost always fascinating when he blogs about anything that directly concerns Microsoft.

What's interesting is how truly free-wheeling some of the ramblings on these sites can be. Consider SimpleGeek, a Web site penned by Chris Anderson, who works for the vendor giant. Anderson's disclaimer reads "...No, I don't think that everything that Microsoft does and produces is wonderful and perfect..." Despite this, he clearly advances Microsoft's agenda through wit, humor and even humanity.

So although I am still no big fan of Microsoft, I am interested in what it's people have to say and am positively influenced, to some degree, because the company let's them use their own voice unfiltered but by common sense. If the Redmond ogre can do it, so can any other company...

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