Lots of great Channel9 interviews were done this week. I got to the Indigo team, the VB.NET team, Dave Mendlen (he was Steve Ballmer's speech writer and now is in charge of Web Services marketing), and today Anders Hejlsberg. Plus we interviewed one of the guys who runs Longhorn's build process (yeah, he's the one who really knows whether or not Longhorn is on schedule or not).

Anders is scary smart and nice to boot. He tells how he developed Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh on a Sun Microsystems box. Among other historical trivia.

We interviewed him right in the middle of Microsoft's newly-revamped museum. I can't wait to get that up for you all (he gives us a tour through history).

Today we started airing the interview we did with Neil Enns of the SmartPhone team, and Kam Vedbrat, lead program manager on Longhorn's UX team (all the graphics and animations).

What do you think? We've put up more than 70 videos so far.

It's going to be a light posting weekend. I'm down with my son. We'll be in San Francisco at Wired Magazine's NextFest. We'll show up at 10 a.m. My cell phone is 408-314-8233 if you want to meet up there. We should be in San Francisco most of the day.

Rick Schaut reminds us that Microsoft is a Macintosh company too.

Everyone who works at Microsoft should thank the Macintosh and the hardy rebels who work on the Mac platform inside Microsoft. In the 1980s it was Microsoft's investment in the Macintosh that led to learning what worked and/or didn't work in GUIs and modern computers. That learning is what led directly to the success of Windows 95.

Plus, Microsoft's MacBU keeps coming up with great new things that challenge the Windows groups here.

Keep it up Rick. This is one reason why I think every team here should have a blogger. What a great reminder that your team exists.

Dave Winer: "We gotta eat. No more begging. You want the software, find a way to help companies like Six Apart instead of making them miserable. You've now got the tools to communicate. Use them well. Use them better."

I agree with that. I remember running the books and paying the bills (or attempting to) at UserLand and trying to figure out how I was going to pay the bandwidth bills, the rent on the office, the electricity bill, the phone bill, the mail bill, salaries (Dave Winer, by the way, wasn't getting any salary while I was at UserLand) and, yes, even the W3C (I ended up not paying the W3C in the end cause it was about $5,000 and we didn't have enough money. $5,000 ended up paying our hosting bill for several months).

Believe me, every sale counted, even at $40 each. It's why I picked up the phone before it rang twice. I didn't want to lose a single sale.

I learned a long time ago that there's no such thing as a free lunch. It's something that you should remember when people say "come over here, you can get our software for free." I feel for Moveable Type, though. When you create expectations that your software is free it's hard to change business strategies.

Molly Holzschlag (on Atom and W3C and WaSP): "My opinion? There is no standard to advocate yet, and it's not our holy war."

I disagree. Syndication technology has changed how I use the Web more than any other technology that's come along since I first used a Netscape browser back in 1995. You either care now and get involved, or you'll be stuck with whatever the market decides. The fact is the world is moving on. Adoption is happening quickly.

We especially need voices like Molly's on this topic now. (She ran Miller Freeman's Web magazine in the 1990s and has been a major voice in the Web world for a long time).

Why now? Cause Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun, UserLand, Apple, Six Apart, LiveJournal, Google, and all the other players in the market, are all building specs (and releasing products/services) that have syndication built in -- I know first hand of projects in various stages of development in all of the above companies.

And, I don't really care whether you're pro Atom or anti. If you are a Web developer, your users will demand these features over the next few years. The time to tell the market what you think is now. In two years it'll be too late.

Syndication +is+ something that the Web standards project, and others interested in Web standards should care about NOW while there's time for companies to change their direction.

OK, who wants to go to Wired's NextFest in San Francisco this weekend? I'm game. See ya on Saturday.

Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Media Analyst: "Let me be clear. Tablet PC is not going away."

Marc Orchant reports that LookOut 1.0 has been released. LookOut is a search tool for Outlook and has gotten raves from around the blogosphere.

The RSS Weblog interviews Luke Hutteman, author of SharpReader, a news aggregator for Windows.

How did I miss the XAMLBlogs? For you Longhorn types.

Plaxo Blog: Plaxo 2.0 will feature Yahoo search inside Outlook.

Damir Tomicic links to the first 3D Blog Reader, and then taunts me "Gotcha Scoble!"

That's cool.

David Brownell: MFC bad. WTL good.

"I guarantee that if you are forced to write a GUI application in C++, the time spent in the slight learning curve will be more than recouped during the first project in which you use it."

Andy Budd's objective look at table vs. CSS-based design is getting lots of raves around the blogosphere.

Dan Gillmor, of the San Jose Mercury News: "If Google is going to push the Atom syndication method going forward, there is a huge opportunity here for Microsoft."

Michael Earls is onto a killer mapping feature: show me nearby places.

Tim Duckett: "The conversations aren’t being played out behind the scenes in support forums or “sucks” sites - they’re right there on the front page for everyone to see."

I agree with Tim. But, one thing, you'll see lots of people taking Microsoft to task all over the Web. Including in our own newsgroups and MSDN forums on every page. Might not be quite on the front page, but critical comment about our products is very easy to find and I don't see anyone trying to delete any of those comments (if it happens, please let me know).

I certainly won't run away from critical comment. It helps us get better. It's the reason I leave comments turned on (and why we made it pretty darn easy to join the forums over on Channel9).

Brian Johnson buys a Ford Focus. I didn't know that they had a fan club. I +love+ mine. Just passed 3,000 miles and doesn't even have a rattle.

BitWorking gets all the news of the day into one post: Google, Atom, Six Apart, and Longhorn.

Speaking of Longhorn, I'm one of the world's top Longhorn cheerleaders, but even I'm getting tired of hearing about Longhorn. How can anyone know what the performance will be? The first beta is not going to be here until next year. Let's care about this stuff then.

Having syndication feeds on Google Groups is very cool, though.

Ed Sim, who writes the "Beyond VC" weblog, reports on insights he's gained at a recent CIO conference. He's sensing that spending is increasing in IT.