Blogs are good for business, Bill Gates says. God bless Bill

Posted by Bertrand Pecquerie on May 21, 2004 at 6:28 PM

Today, it's almost impossible to find an American blog without a comment on what the Microsoft chairman has said about the blogosphere... For lot of bloggers, it's a sort of (religious) consecration. According to BBC, In a speech to an audience of chief executives, Mr Bill Gates said the regularly updated journals, or blogs, could be a good way for firms to tell customers, staff and partners what they are doing. Mr Gates' blessing of blogs came during his keynote speech at Microsoft's CEO Summit held on the company's campus in Redmond, Seattle. Mr Gates made a point of dwelling on blogs and said that although they started in the technical community and have come to be a broader social phenomenon, businesses can use them too.

Blogs have advantages over more traditional ways of keeping in touch such as e-mail and websites, he said. E-mail messages could be too imposing or miss out key people who should be included, said Mr Gates.

Websites were a problem too, he added, because they demand that people visit them regularly to find out if anything has changed and require regular updating to avoid going stale.

These problems could be solved, said Mr Gates, by using blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), that lets people know when a favourite journal is updated.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," he said.

"The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it."

Microsoft currently does not make any individual blogging tools but it is widely expected to move into this space soon. If it does the move would pitch it into even sharper competition with Google and others such as AOL.

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and moving force behind Berkshire Hathaway , was in attendance at the eighth annual CEO summit put on by Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. Also on hand were Barry Diller of InteractiveCorp , Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard , Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Dell Inc.'s own Michael Dell.

Source: BBC news

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