Scott Gutherie talks about dogfooding inside Microsoft. No, the practice doesn't involve either food or dogs. It's great to see Scott weblogging. Microsoft "ho" disclaimer: Scott runs the ASP.NET team at Microsoft.

Erik Barzeski says I'm "Microsoft's ho." Heh.

For those of you starting new conferences (Alan Meckler, are you paying attention?) there's a really cool new weblog in town: Doug Fox. He founded the "EventWeb newsletter" which is still the best place to keep up on the event planning industry. Today he is talking about cool interactive name badges. I wonder if they can be made cost-effective enough to get widespread adoption. I'd love to see these at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

You know, I continue getting tons more traffic from the Apple rumor sites over a single sentence I wrote than from any other Windows-based site lately. Now I understand why Microsoft is worried about its community status. Of course, the other side of that argument is: does having a strong community actually sell any product? It could be argued that it doesn't since Apple only has a few percent of the overall computing market and that number has dropped in recent years, not risen.

Of course, if you want a light-weight Apple notebook, you only have one choice: a 12-inch model that weighs 4.6 pounds.

If you want a light-weight Tablet PC, you have dozens of models to choose from, all with different features and processors and screen choices. Almost all of which weigh under 4.6 pounds. (The model my employer -- NEC -- sells is the lightest at 2.2 lbs).

Can community overcome choice? I think the answer is -- so far -- no.

But, Microsoft is clearly scared of what happens when community meets choice. Someone just showed me a Linux operating system that runs on my laptop WITHOUT LOADING ANY SOFTWARE ON THE HARD DRIVE (Knoppix). That's pretty cool. Clearly the open source community is strong and seems to be gaining strength (look at the popularity of SlashDot, for instance).

So, what will Microsoft's answer be? We have yet to see it. I know a bunch of smart people are working on it, though. There are interesting times ahead for people who love PCs. That's for sure.

Have a great Friday.