Stewart Alsop of Fortune Magazine: "Microsoft's problem is that it has gotten boring."

Randy Holloway picks up on Stewart's rant.

My comment? Stewart said that Longhorn is only interesting to the geeks. If that were true, I would never have taken the job at Microsoft.

But, we'll see more rants like this over the next few months and even years. Why? Because Microsoft isn't going to demonstrate Longhorn until it's ready to show publicly and that keeps employees like me from talking openly about the issues. Translation: Stewart can say anything he wants about Longhorn, and I gotta let the comment sit there.

Longhorn is gonna be the tar baby for journalists everywhere. Most of what will be said between now and the PDC will prove out to be untrue. It goes with the territory.

The other problem is, Microsoft is a huge company. Doing a huge number of things. Is it boring? Well, is the Xbox team boring? Is the SPOT team boring? Is Windows Server 2003 boring? And that's just three of the dozens of products Microsoft is working on.

Man, imagine if I worked in the ice cream business. Stewart would probably call what Cold Stone Creamery is doing to that market boring. After all, it's just ice cream.

Jim McGee: "So, Scoble, here's a question for you. When you're evangelizing Longhorn in days to come, will you be just talking about some whizbang new feature or might you mention in passing the eleventy gazillion users in the installed base?"

My answer: I'm an evangelist for Longhorn. I view XP as a competitor. After all, I'm going to be asking you all to change. Change won't be easy. I didn't take my job because it would be easy.

I wonder, did Guy Kawasaki or Steve Jobs view the tons of Apple II users as an advantage to early Macintosh evangelism efforts?