Dwight Silverman, in the Houston Chronicle, writes: Microsoft MIA on RSS.

Ouch, but, yes, it's frustrating how long it takes to get new features added to our products.

That said, let's meetup again at the PDC in September and see if you still think we're missing in action.

But, there's another way to look at it. We've built a platform that lets developers add value. There are a TON of RSS news aggregators on Windows. Look at Onfolio 2.0, for instance. That works with Firefox and IE and is an awesome aggregator. Or, look at FeedDemon. That's a standalone application, developed in Borland's Delphi, that rocks too. RSS Bandit was developed, on .NET, by a Microsoft employee during his nights and weekends and it has a huge community around it (it's free too and now is being run as an open source project, so it's getting lots of new features added very quickly). Then you look at NewsGator (and their competitors IntraVnews and YouSoftware). Those plug into Outlook (I use NewsGator as my primary RSS News Aggregator).

So, Microsoft's platforms get credit for these innovative -- and quite different from each other -- approaches to RSS.

We need to remember that anything Microsoft does will affect the livelihoods of the developers who built these products (and took the business risk back when RSS didn't look important). They validated Microsoft's investment in development tools and platforms and for that I'm very grateful.

6:48:53 AM