Arjun Ram says Microsoft has been doing the community stuff better and much earlier than java.net. Many company employees have a blog now. Mary Jo Foley tells that “Microsoft has no official policy on corporate blogging”. She has carried these comments made by Microsoft employee Scoble in his blog:

I think executives who weblog (particularly at Microsoft) are between a rock and a hard place. If they say anything interesting, they’ll immediately get picked up in the press and their comments will probably be taken out of context.

Another Microsoft employee, David Weller, in a recent post to his blog.

From what I’ve been indirectly told, I’m supposed to put a disclaimer in all of my posts. Screw that. Microsoft isn’t paying me to write this blog, Microsoft isn’t paying for my blogging software, and Microsoft isn’t paying my hosting fees to run my blog.

At least on building a community, Microsoft has to learn a lot.