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.

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/

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/

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.