Darn, lost a reader. Evan DiBiase says he unsubscribed, er got "unscobleized.". I guess he didn't like me teaching the naive newbies what ROFL means and he didn't like my Microsoft-centric nature. Hmmm.

John Moore notices that there's disconnect between my posts "pre-Microsoft" and "post-Microsoft."

Stuart Henshall: "So why did Microsoft hire such a well-known blogger in Robert? Many reasons I'm sure."

It's gonna be a geeky week next week as Dana Epp is staying the week here while he attends the sold-out Driver DevCon at Microsoft.

Greg Reinacker, the guy who wrote NewsGator, has a sharp eye!

MSNBC: Microsoft to offer bounty on hackers ($250,000).

Peter Rysavy gives me an excellent list of how Microsoft can improve its relationship with ISVs. This one is going on the wall.

The folks who hide out in the comments here tell me that I'm not being fair. They say that I point to stats when they show Microsoft in a good light, but I don't point to stats, like this one, that show us in a bad light. Oh, wait, I just pointed to it. Darn, thought I was gonna have a good point here about life not being fair. Translation: I try to do the right thing but I don't read Slashdot every morning (it blocks my news aggregator cause it says it visits too often).

Anyway, you can follow what folks say in the hidden cracks of my commenting system by subscribing to my RSS feed of my comments.

Shawn Morrissey: "The PDC wasn't the blogging PDC that I hoped for."

Good point. I didn't blog at all during the week. There was just simply too much to absorb.

Lots of tech industry news today. Novell buys SuSE Linux. Microsoft goes with IBM for next Xbox.

Mike Sanders: "I would love to hear somebody (maybe Scoble or Joshua Allen) make the cost-justifiable business case to follow Microsoft along the Rich User Client path."

Too bad you missed the demo done by Merck. They saw enough business value in doing a rich client. They see that it'll save millions in the development of new drugs. Why? Because it lets them build apps that simply are impossible to build in a browser. We'll have a LOT more to say on the business justification behind this stuff, believe me.

Or, ask Amazon. They see that Longhorn experiences will increase revenues. They were up on stage during the keynotes too. Or Adobe. They see that their customers will be able to build new kinds of apps that simply are very difficult, if not impossible, to build today.

The business justification actually is very simple to make. If you really are interested in hearing more the Longhorn evangelism team would love to hear from you.

Randy Holloway talks about the new way that Microsoft is communicating with its customers. Ahh, he noticed! So, what's next? What could we do even better?

Welp, I'm caught up with the RSS feeds. Now gotta catch some sleep.

Silicon.com: "Red Hat's chief executive has said that Linux needs to mature further before home users will get a positive experience from the operating system, saying they should choose Windows instead."

Tom Mertens: Lessons learned at the PDC.

Scott Loftesness says "Scoble's speaking in parables."

Oh, geez. There are some things in Scott's reply to me that are NOT true. Microsoft invests a LOT in making sure things are high performance -- the Longhorn performance story hasn't been written yet. I remember working with the NetMeeting team and they took great joy in showing off how performant their code was (not to mention the entire app was less than three megabytes, while ICQ today is more than 10).

Actually, if you look Ole's points, he makes it clear that he believes that IE won in the marketplace because it performed better. That didn't happen by accident.

Also, he says that Quartz already does everything Longhorn will do in three years. That's also not true. But, I don't wanna pull an Andreeson, so you'll have to figure that out on your own. We've already hyped up the market enough about Longhorn. Go back to sleep for another couple of years. :-)

IBM's John Patrick: "I decided to begin the journey toward Linux for my desktop, to learn more about Linux, and see how far I can get. I'll be writing about my experiences here on patrickWeb."

Tim Bray makes the case that end users aren't asking for rich client apps. Heh, if you can find an end user that even knows what a rich client app is I'd be suprised. Tim, you're asking the wrong questions.

Now, go back to mom and dad and ask "wouldn't you like a web browser that doesn't erase all that stuff you just entered in on your banking form if you accidentally click on a link?" or "wouldn't you like to watch three videos on a page at once?" or "wouldn't you like to play a new kind of high-performance video game while reading the news?"

How about "wouldn't you like to have rich video and rich animation-based interfaces that don't require downloading yet another plugin?" Or, "hey, look at the new Amazon interface we showed off on stage at the PDC, wouldn't you like to tour through Amazon like that?"

Ahh, the stage is set by eWeek for a "Linux vs. Longhorn" showdown.

ROFL.

Rory Blyth's latest.

Visit Rory's blog and see why I'm ROFL.

For those of who who are really new to this game: ROFL means "Rolling On the Floor Laughing."

Mike Gunderloy posts a post-PDC rant about what he's seen so far: "I should preface this by noting that I wasn't there. This means that I've been free of the Microsoft reality-distortion field, but also that I'm relying on published stuff to form my opinions."

Ingo Rammer wonders what is wrong with Seattle weather. I tell ya, it's been messed up ever since the Scoble's moved north.

I liked this review of last Monday's keynotes by Jon Kale: "It's Windows, but it sucks less." I was in those keynotes, sitting near Chris Sells way in the back. Nothing like seeing Don and Chris on eight of the 16 screens. Nothing like seeing Jim Allchin playing code monkey on them either.

If you haven't figured out by now, I'm going through my list of 600+ RSS feeds looking for gems to post. I'm on the "D's" right now. I'm a week behind, so shoot me. But, my workflow goes something like this:

1) Open my RSS folder (it has 618 subfolders).

2) Click on the first bold one. Scan the headlines.

3) If something like this headline pops out, blog it: "Don Box Violated Me Tonight."

Note: anything about cats gets automatically passed up.

Paul Paradise: The Magic of Blogging.

Dare Obasanjo says that the weblogger BOF at the PDC focused on the wrong thing. Well, I was there, and one of the problems of the BOF was that we didn't focus on anything for more than a couple of minutes. The Atom vs. RSS thing was a mere two-minute discussion.

But, I agree, we didn't get important work done. We probably should have split the crowd up into smaller groups.

I was just over at Dan Gillmor's site (he writes about tech for the San Jose Mercury News) and saw that he was wondering if a new Microsoft fan site was real or not. Anyone know? I've never heard of the Microsoft user network before.

Larry Magid has a weblog, but no RSS feed that I can see, and no conversations taking place. Oh well, I'll point to him anyway. If you don't know who Larry is, here's his bio. Writes tech for New York Times, among others.

Dumky: "...I don't really like the PDC/Longhorn (over)hype..."

Scott Hanselman: "PDC was the shiznit." Good overview of what was important to take away from the PDC.

Scott Hanselman noticed the preparation that went into the PDC. I love that Don Box comes along in his comments and corrects one of Scott's assumptions.

Oh, Don Box is getting into the Jon Udell conversation too (actually Don's posted twice already on the topic -- here's the first post).

Dare Obasanjo replies to InfoWorld's Jon Udell about his "Replace and Defend" piece. Now we're getting someplace! Notice. Jon started a conversation. Dare replied. Anyone else? Oh, yeah, John Montgomery1 and John Montgomery2.

John Coggeshall starts an interesting conversation with his rant titled "Microsoft, and why they might care about Open Source."

Brad Abrams is quickly becoming one of my favorite Microsoft bloggers.

Steve Maine put up a new PDCbloggers flair.

Benjamin Mitchell has a cool photo blogroll from the PDC. I wish we could do something like this for everyone of our attendees.

I guess I should put a disclaimer on my weblog. Benjamin Voigt has one of the better ones. Since I haven't talked about it in a while and I have a ton of new readers: I'm a technical evangelist on the Longhorn team for the Microsoft Corporation.

Tony Perkins says Silicon Valley is back. Hey, just got back from there last night. Is it back? Well, the traffic is back. Even on weekends. Jobs (and not Steve, heh) seem to be coming back, but there's plenty of open space in lots of those big industrial parks. The dirty little secret is that there's still a huge amount wrong. There are still tons of people out of work. Many for a very long time. My brother in law has all but given up. There are still people trying to leave. Tons of "for rent" and "for sale signs." Housing prices there are still over the top expensive (Maryam and I couldn't afford a home there).

But, the valley is still a great place to be for a geek. If you're a geek there are really only a handful of places in the world you can live and meet lots of geeks. Silicon Valley is still on the top of that list.

The weather is still the best in the world.

That said, I'm very happy to not be living there right now. It's going to be very hard for anyone but the most expensive employees to live there. To buy a three-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood you'd need to be making $150,000 at minimum (980 square foot houses in Santa Clara now sell for $500,000). I don't make that. Most of my friends and family don't make that. Translation: the pressures to give up your personal life and work two jobs just to pay the mortgage are very extreme.

G. Andrew Duthie: "In the .NET world, we're all .NET programmers." Interesting rant about why he believes VB shouldn't be differentiated from C#.

Werner Vogels calls me a "bad boy" for not making sure the PDC Community Environment application was "Tablet friendly." Good point. We'll go into this more next week. Software development is about tradeoffs. When you have an inflexible deadline (the PDC wasn't gonna move) you need to reduce your set of requirements to get your app done on time.

Remember, this thing was done with very few resources and very little time. We did test it on the Tablets though.

Chris DeHerrera is tracking all the Tablet PC stuff that went on at the PDC last week on his very nice TabletPCTalk site.

Dan Shafer: "At the end of the day, MS' overreaction cost it a lot more than it had to. Stupid. Unnecessarily stupid."

The rumor: Microsoft wants to buy Google.

The reality: Microsoft Blogger has dinner with Google's founders. (I took that picture a couple of weeks ago at O'Reilly's FooCamp)

OK, I've gotta go on the record. I did NOT ask Brin and Sergey if we could buy Google. Wouldn't it be wacky if all of this is due to someone reading too much into that dinner? Hmmm.

Susan Kitchens, one of the first bloggers I ever read, was blogging the Los Angeles fires last week.

Congrats to Chris Pirillo for getting a redesign of Lockergnome. Nice newsletters for geeks.

Anyone try Copernic's Summarizer? I used Copernic's stuff back before I really got into Google, but this new tool looks like it's been much improved. I'll put it on my "to try" list and see if it is good enough to get me to stop visiting Google's toolbar.

So, I think the PDC 2003 photoblog is done with. Looking through those, man we built some memories up. Any ideas on how to improve photoblogs of events like this? There'll be more events and Text America would appreciate your help in making these even more useful.

.NET Developer's Journal: Borland Delphi 8 Simplifies Transition to .NET Framework.

So, I'm starting to dig through all the press reviews of the PDC and Longhorn last week. Here I found Extreme Tech has a good review. Anyone have some favorites? Man am I far behind.

Another one I heard all week long is "Paul Thurrott this" and "Paul Thurrott that." Ahh, now I see. He has videos!

Chris Hollander says that this PDC was the "Blogging PDC." Very true. Tons of people experienced blogs and RSS for the first time. OK, here's a question: why aren't all of you using an RSS News Aggregator yet?

1) Too lazy to try?

2) Have no idea what RSS is?

3) Thought you needed Longhorn to do that?

So, what's your excuse for still using a Web browser to visit sites like MSDN or my weblog? Have you seen the little XML icon over on the right? Ever wonder what that is? So ask! That's why I have comments.