Lots of people are talking about the Forbes article about open source (Linux Loyalists Leery). I just started reading it, looks interesting so far.

Keith Hurwitz wants in on the job game, from the other end of the scale. He works at Microsoft and he's looking for someone to work for him. "Account Technology Specialist" (ATS) position in Columbus, Ohio. Hey, if this continues I'm just gonna sell my blog to Craig Newmark or something. (Craig started "CraigsList" which is where I got my NEC job. I owe that guy dinner, cause if it weren't for that I probably wouldn't be here right now).

I was interviewed by WebTalkRadio earlier this week and my interview will be aired in the morning, I hear.

APress is one of my favorite book publishers. Will they become one of my favorite blog publishers as well? Hmmm, time will tell, but very interesting start so far!

Ronnie Williams emailed me a recommendation for my friend to check out "RentACoder." If you're looking for work, or have work, it's a site you should check out.

Someone I know reports their machine was trashed by Windows XP Service Pack 2. It kept a few of his apps (like Yahoo messenger) from working. He says he's heard other reports and wanted me to let people know that there are risks involved in trying beta software. Have any of you run into problems running XPSP2?

I have a friend. He's a Microsoft Regional Director, and MVP, and a speaker at this year's Tech Ed. One of his company's major clients just ran into budet difficulties. This guy is one of the most talented .NET programmers I've met. He was one of the highest rated VBITS/VSLive speakers when my wife and I hired him to be on stage and his team are also expert .NET developers. Anyway, he's looking for work that's challenging and, obviously, .NET related. BI/OLAP stuff is a specialty as well. If you know of anything, please email me at rscoble@microsoft.com. And, no, Gretchen, he isn't willing to relocate to Redmond. Heh.

It'll be interesting to see more employee reaction of the Sun/Microsoft agreement over on the employee blogs, but Tim Sneath links to the live webcast and gives his reaction:

"I can't tell you how odd it feels as a Microsoft employee to see Scott McNealy (Sun CEO) and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) sitting next to each other on a press conference stage, let alone joking with each other and exchanging ice hockey shirts. We've been very vigorous competitors for so many years in the enterprise space, that I'm still in shock - it's the equivalent of Coca-Cola and Pepsi agreeing to share their secret recipes in terms of significance for the part of the industry I work in.

InfoWorld: Longhorn beta likely to slip into 2005.

Here's Slashdot's reaction to the announcement.

I see Sam Ruby wrote about the Social Computing Symposium held at Microsoft earlier this week. One interesting thing is that he thinks Feedster and Technorati are replacing "high traffic link blogs, like Scoble." I absolutely agree.

I've already subscribed to a feed for "Sun Microsoft" just to see what reaction on the blogosphere is. But, how many search terms can you really watch? Most people don't want to watch them all, and they only want the hilights. So, blogs like mine will change.

Oh, over on Sam's blog was also a discussion of the backchannel at the symposium. Someone turned on an IRC chat room. Soon about half the audience, or more, was in the chat room. It got a bit snarky. I don't mind that. Another Microsoft employee did. And told off some of the participants. So, what happened? Another chat room was created, but only those comfortable with snarkiness were invited in.

Personally, if I were a speaker, I'd love to participate in a "super snarky room." Why? I learn from snarky comments. But I understand not everyone will agree with me. It certainly is a different world at events lately, though.

Whew, that's a big reminder to treat your enemies well. In the 11 months since I've been here I've seen two of Microsoft's most famous competitors become friends, and even strong partners.

So, what do you think? I'm still trying to grok what this means. Steve Ballmer sent us all email this morning. What a shock. I never expected this. And, no, it's not an April fools joke. Heck, in that meeting with Tim Bray on Sunday (who is working on syndication and weblogging technologies for Sun Microsystems), it was clear that neither of us had any clue this was coming.

It'll be interesting to learn more about what this will mean for Longhorn. It'll probably take a few months for this announcement to really play out and changes to be made to specs.

Speaking about Longhorn, I see Bill Gates has announced that Longhorn is now scheduled for 2006. I've avoided discussions of ship dates or schedules. Why? Because things change too often. I don't want to set expectations that turn out not to be met later on. But, the latest is that the first Longhorn beta probably won't hit until next year. This year we'll see at least one more "developer preview" (translation: alpha).

Wow. Microsoft and Sun resolve their differences. No, this had nothing to do with Sun Microsystems' employee Tim Bray and me having lunch earlier this week. Just a wild coincidence.

Glad to see that we'll be working together to make our customer's lives better.