Microsoft was one of the first large corporations where employees used blogs as a way to communicate with the world outside the firewall and to put a human face on a company that many regarded as faceless.
The first Microsoft employee to reach out was Joshua Allen who sits a couple of offices down from me and Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything, had this to say about him:
"Microsoft wasn't known as a haven of openness and cooperation. But it was a big place with a lot of smart people. At the turn of the millennium, during the company's bitter antitrust fight with the U.S. Department of Justice, many of those people found it impossible to recognize themselves in the press's portrait of the company. The first programmer at Microsoft to start blogging, Joshua Allen, set himself up with an account on Dave Winer's EditThisPage service in 2000 and started posting under the header "Better Living Through Software: Tales of Life at Microsoft." It was totally informal and unauthorized -- a lone call for a parley raised from behind the company's siege walls. Allen explained his intent: "I wanted to say that I am a Microsoft person and you can talk with me."
It’s interesting to see this openness evolve and become adopted from just about every company from Amazon to Zapos, where now you can get help from customer services by tweeting and your brand can grow a group of fans on Facebook.
Hat tip to Jon Udell.