Bill Gates backs blogs for businesses

Bill Gates told the world Thursday that Blogs are a big deal for businesses and that companies should start using blogs and RSS (Real Simple Syndication) for communicating with customers, staff and partners. Bill Gates topped it off by saying blogs have advantages over other, older ways of communicating such as email and Web sites. This is Bill Gates we’re talking off folks – a guy that does not try to predict the future for business purposes – he makes the future.

Bill Gates didn’t announce his views in the lunchroom at Microsoft. He did it at the eighth annual Microsoft CEO Summit attended by 100 global business leaders including Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and media tycoon Barry Diller.

Here’s what the BBC reported early this morning:

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.

They had 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 favorite journal is updated.

Gates succinctly put what I really believe:”What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate, the ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it.”