Fifty-five thousand, Fifty-five thousand, Fifty-five thousand, Fifty-five thousand!

Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble is a name with which I have been long acquainted, first through the magazine he worked for, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (which has since morphed into Visual Studio Magazine), then meeting him in person at a Doc Searls-led dinner at the first O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in 2002, and finally through The Scobleizer Weblog. He and I are both paid company cheerleaders; I’m the Tucows developer schmoozer, he’s an evangelist for Microsoft.

If there are three things I have learned from his blogs, they are:

1. He really, really, really, really likes his tablet computer.

2. Longhorn is the codename of the next version of Windows, and it’s got lots of new features.

But the point he’s managed to really drive home:

3. There are 55,000 employees at Microsoft.

I’m quite impressed that he’s managed to wedge that fact so deeply into my brain. I can tell you how many people work at Tucows (about 80 in the Toronto office and 20-ish in Flint, Michingan, for a grand total of about 100), but I can’t give you the employee head count at any of the other software vendors whose products I use regularly: the Apache group, Apple, Bare Bones, Borland, IBM, Macormedia, Python Labs, Red Hat, Sun or Zend.

I can for Microsoft: 55,000.

As I write this, there are two mentions of the number of people who work at Microsoft on his current blog page. What number would that be?

Fifty-five thousand.

Fifty-five thousand.

Fifty-five thousand.

It’s even catchier than Steve Ballmer’s famous “DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS” chant-cum-near-cardian-arrest in his infamous video.

I remember hearing stories about how deeply engrained the alphabet is in our brains; even severely badly brain-damaged people can recite it. I imagine that if I were in a car accident that sent me through the windshield and turned my brain into grey guacamole, I’d still be able to tell you that there are 55,000 employees at Microsoft.

Now that’s company evangelism!