[efitz]

I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.

Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.

I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.

I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.

I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.

And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.

[bastawhiz]

I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.

It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.

[Arainach]

Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.

Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

[qingcharles]

They are still pretty good with it, it just gets a lot less press now blogging isn't the flavor-of-the-month. I check their dev blogs routinely:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/

[riffraff]

In the 00s I remember receiving a pingback from the internet explorer blog about a post I had made to complain about ES4.

I was/am a nobody, I have no idea how that happened and it was mind blowing that MS was interacting with me.

[Sophira]

> I didn’t see the original post...

If you or anyone else who sees this wants to see the original post, it's still available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....

[stuaxo]

Oof that was a very unwise blog post to make.

Copywriter aside it looks like an interesting blog post.