Over on Channel 9 we just put up a video that Mike Hall shot with the product unit manager of the Portable Media Center team. If you're interested in getting a look at the portable media center, this is the video for you.

Shannon Hager: What are the Longhorn evangelists getting paid for?

He writes: "Scoble should be earning his pay and telling us why Longhorn still matters, why we should wait, what IS going to be in it."

The thing is that I don't have any credibility left when it comes to Longhorn. Over the last 18 months I got out there and lead lots of Longhorn cheers. And now there's a changing of direction.

Tons of people, both inside and outside of Microsoft, have been talking with me about where we're going now. I've met in the past week with the Avalon and WinFS teams (yes, they both still exist).

The thing is, I am super sensitive right now to making a whole new round of promises. I'd rather wait to talk until there's beta build to hand you. Why? Cause what good does it do to write about the feature set if you can't see it? And if you're a developer, you don't want to hear FUD, you wanna see working APIs.

So, I'm gonna be quiet until there's bits to hand you all to discuss. If there's a business need that you have, let's serve that in email privately. Does that make sense?

For the next 18 months, where are the business opportunities going to lie? Tablet PC. Bigtime. Windows Media Center. Gonna be a big deal. SmartPhones. Wanna watch how fast the Motorola MPX220 sells when it's released in the next few months? Xbox Live. You only need to say one number and everyone knows exactly the Xbox thing I'm talking about: "2." Visual Studio 2005. Tons of stuff coming there. MSN has a whole raft of things up their sleeves. And we haven't even started talking about BizTalk, Sharepoint, Exchange, SQL Server, 64-bit Windows, SBS, CRM, LiveMeeting, and OneNote, among other things.

Ahh, lots of geeks are getting into the latest Star Wars stuff. My office neighbor, David Weller, is no different. He bought all the latest StarWars DVDs and the latest video game. He found something particularly satisfying in the latest game.

Tom Peters: Idiots!

Ahh, it's nice to see that Tom has put up an RSS feed.

Seeing customers in pain bums me out. Here's one that I found on Tim Bray's blog.

David Morse: I'm sorry that we failed you.

"The lesson to be learned is an obious one, Microsoft sucks and CDW can make the impossible happen," David wrote on his blog.

I can't fix what's been broken, but I'm here for you in case you give us another chance at your business.

By the way, when I worked at NEC I dealt a LOT with CDW and wow, are they great. They had the best IT infrastructure of any of the distributors I dealt with and their people were always nice nice nice. That sure goes a long way.

Yeah, I take it personally when a customer isn't happy with us. Why? Cause it doesn't take too many customers to fire us before we're all out on the street.

Zef Hamel: Why Microsoft Can't Hire Great Programmers.

"As Apple obviously has less employees than Microsoft, how is it possible that Apple with less workforce does stuff faster?"

I have a lot to say on this topic, but I'm going to hold back a bit. I wanna see what kinds of interesting ideas bubble up from Zef's thesis.

One thing is that I totally disagree that a non-programmer can't recognize great programming talent. I'm not a programmer. But I recognize Bram Cohen of Bittorrent as a great programmer. Why? Cause of what he wrote. I recognize that Chris Uhlik over at Google is a great programmer. Why? Cause of what he wrote. I recognize Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire as a great programmer. Why? Cause of what he wrote. I recognize Stewart Butterfield of Flickr as a great programmer. Why? Cause of what he wrote. Dave Winer. Cause of what he wrote.

Hint: there are lots of great programmers at Microsoft too. Come over to the Tablet PC team. The Media Center team. Or visit Chris Pratley of the OneNote team. Or step on over and meet the Visual Studio team. Heck, and we won't even bring up the wild stuff that's going on in the research department. Oh, and did you see that we hired the guy who invented the Wiki? The guy who invented Tetris? Have you looked at the code on Xbox Live? How can you say that great programmers aren't coming to work here?

As to why is Apple faster? How many boxes does Apple have to test? Now, how many permutations does Microsoft have to test? The problem sets are completely different.

Speaking of great programmers, have you seen the work that the automotive group has done? How can you say that isn't the work of a great set of programmers?

Yes, we're hiring. In all sorts of interesting projects.

Are you interested in the venture capital scene? The San Jose Mercury News today had an article about VC bloggers. Ross Mayfield has the details and a nice list of them on his blog today.

The geek dinner on Saturday evening just got more interesting. Jeffrey McManus, eBay's developer evangelist, says he's coming.

Niall Kennedy lists out a whole bunch of things happening in the San Francisco area this weekend.

Just looking over the 140 items I uploaded to my link blog tonight and several people praised Brent Simmons' latest release of NetNewsWire. Here's Ted Leung's report. This is a Macintosh-based RSS News Aggregator.