What can we learn from Microsoft's Mac BU blog?

So it's official. Everyone's doing it. Blogging, that is. That's right, pretty much everyone these days has a blog, including a freshy from the good folks at Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (Mac BU). Their blog, affectionately titled Mac Mojo (kudos on the name guys!) is part of Redmond's strategy to try to be warm and fuzzy and to stay more in touch with their user base.

Blogs are a great way to break down the corporate facade and allow employees to express their individuality - and it beats the heck out of those horrendous press releases that are embroidered with adjectives and corporate doublespeak. Blogs give a corporation a more human face. Jason Calacanis goes so far at to tell his colleagues at AOL to "Blog or Die."

If you are in the Internet industry and you don't have time to blog about your product then you should quit. Go home, give up, and find another career. Your competitors are blogging about their products and talking to the market, and there is no way to compete if you don't engage the discussion. So, by not blogging you basically are giving up and telling the market that you don't care. That's the honest truth.

So what can we learn from Microsoft's Mac Mojo? A lot.

In addition to learning about the history of the MacBU (Microsoft started working with Apple in 1977), we learn about how one MBUer went off to join the circus but was assimilated into Microsoft via Connectix, how many of them are former Apple employees, what a PowerPoint digital opera is, how they're the largest Macintosh development organization outside of Apple (180 people), that PowerPoint and Excel started out on the Macintosh and what it's like to carry around a PowerBook around the Redmond campus. I'll leave it up to you to find the picture of Bill Gates using a Mac II. Not surprisingly, the Microserfs don't dare talk about iWork '06, the iPod ban on Microsoft property or when Bill Gates got booed at Macworld Expo 1997.

So where's Apple's blog? Their student blog got off to a good start but hasn't been updated since December and the dot-Mac blog is a poor excuse for viral product placement. Apple needs to get on the stick and embrace the new corporate blog culture. Hey, it would be a great use of dot-Mac and iWeb, no?