IBM Tells Employees to Blog Away

Posted on May 15, 2005

The Silicon Valley Watch (SVW) reports that IBM is going to encourage its 130,000 employees to start blogs. SVW says IBM hopes the efforts will lead to lower advertising and marketing costs. The IBM bloggers are to become "online evangelists" for IBM.

Leading the IBM troops into the blogosphere will be IBM's chief strategist, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who will begin writing a blog. He is credited with persuading IBM to become an early advocate for Linux, and to cultivate relationships with the open-source developer community. This resulted in a significant competitive advantage for IBM because it reduced software development costs, and it hurt Microsoft, it's largest competitor.
Mr Wladawsky-Berger will author a blog but Mr Finn says readers might find less on tech and more on baseball -- an interest that relates to his Cuban heritage.

So IBM announces 15,000 layoffs and then encourages the remaining employees to blog? It will be interesting to see if any of the IBM bloggers have anything to say about that.