Steve Gillmor, of eWeek, analyzes Bill Gates recent comments about RSS.

Oh, anti-Microsoft folks won't like this one. He demonstrates how Microsoft could use RSS to lock in customers.

"The lock-in has essentially flipped from vendor-driven to customer-driven. I lock myself into the Tablet because it lets me do most if not all of what I used to do, plus a lot more, in the same amount of time."

InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson: does IT matter?

I don't like the metaphors used here (he positions Windows as a cheap street walker), but this caught my eye:

Charles Miller: the Mac is a harsh mistress.

Thought it'd start some interesting conversations this weekend.

Whew, this weekend I think I'm gonna be playing with new news readers. Here's another RSS reader: BlogMatrix Jäger. This is quite different from the other ones I've tried. They say it's a "one-panel" design. Sorta works like a toolbar along the side of your browser.

Tim Oren went to the Society of Information Display's recent event and brought back a great report. Lots of news about displays. Everything from flexible displays to plasma screens.

Arin Goldberg, one of the geeks on the Tablet PC team, recently gave a 2.5 hour talk on the Tablet PC and now it's up on the Web.

PBS's Frontline has an excellent show online right now: the way the music died. With the music industry clearly hurting, what will it take for an artist to make it in the music industry these days?

Dana Epp, the blogosphere's security expert, takes Microsoft to task for how Longhorn sets up user accounts. He has some great suggestions for how Windows could be made more secure.

Brian Storms is asking where has all the Internet traffic gone?

Yesterday I joined a group of evangelists and built a Longhorn application. David Weller has the details on the day. I echo what Weller says.

It was an amazing day. Every team should be doing these, and we should get customers and ISVs in front of the teams to do exercises just like this every month.

There were representatives from many teams (my partner, Scott Seely, is a developer on the Indigo team) and the learning transfer that went on was amazing. Scott made me type and I learned a lot about programming. I've now seen that the real way to learn programming is to have someone build an app through you, interactively.

Anyway, we need to do a lot more of these days, both to transfer knowledge to more people, but mostly so product teams can see where their technologies are really causing developers a lot of pain.

It also showed me just how many skill sets a development team will need in the future. Graphic design. Hard-core bit twiddling. Deployment and Web developers. Architects. (Not all in that order). They all are needed at various times. Luckily I was among some of Microsoft's smartest developers, and they are reasonably good at all the above. I do note that the pair that had the graphic designer (David Shadle) won a prize for the best application developed.

Thanks to Karsten for talking me into coming. I almost didn't and that would have been the biggest mistake of my career at Microsoft so far.

Alan Meckler talks about Internet Planet. I'll be on a panel discussion there.

Anyone else planning to go? Wanna do a New York geek dinner?