December 16, 2004
@ 02:05 PM

I recently started reading the Microsoft Monitor weblog written by Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research. His blog joins the likes those of Miguel De Icaza and Jon Udell who I can be assured will write a fairly insightful commentary on Microsoft technology announcements. The big difference is that Jon and Miguel occassionally write about Microsoft technologies while Joe Wilcox does so all the time.

In a recent post entitled MSN's Rising Fortune  Joe Wilcox writes

It's strange in a way how fortunes can change, even in a company as large as Microsoft. For years, the MSN folks would be the brunt of jokes, for living on "the red"--as in money-losing--side of the Microsoft campus. And MSN lost money for more than seven straight years. But, under the leadership of Yusuf Mehdi, fiscal 2004 brought the division to profitability. And to prominence.

Consider that today Microsoft will hold a second teleconference on the MSN desktop search utility, this one for financial analysts. I can't recall the last time a MSN technology warranted a teleconference for Wall Street. Sure, search competition with Google is a reason. But today's call is another sign of MSN's growing importance to the broader Microsoft.

While the client division whacks away at Windows security problems, chucks features from Longhorn and readies the next-generation operating system's delivery for not 2005 but 2006, MSN chugs out a barrage of new consumer products. Just in the last few months, MSN has unleashed testing versions of a music store (now officially launched), overhauled IM client, blogging service, Web search service and now desktop search utility. More MSN goodies are coming, but I can't discuss them right now.

My only nitpick with his post is that he seems to have gotten the MSN organizational chart a little confused. Reading the list of Microsoft executives it states that Yusef Mehdi is the Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform while David Cole is the Senior Vice President, MSN and Personal Services Group.

MSN can be broadly divided into information services (aka IS) which is all the content related stuff like the MSN.com webpage, MSN Music as well as MSN Search and communication services (CS) which are all the communication related apps such as Hotmail, MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger. Yusef's runs the IS side of the house while Blake Irving is the Corporate Vice President, MSN Communication Services and Member Platform Group. David Cole sits at the top of the MSN pile.

I just learned all this when I got here a couple of weeks ago. :)


 

Thursday, 16 December 2004 22:25:46 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
A group of us from the MSN 9 Beta took a 1 day tour of MSN last April (co-incided with the end of the MVP Summit). As part of the tour we had a sit down in a conference room at MSN with David Cole. It was funny but the MSN types that were with us were VERY impressed. We basically didn't know him from Adam, and fired off numerous questions about why Messenger wouldn't let you sign in appearing off line, etc. He was great, though, very excited and enthused to meet us and I think he had as much fun as we did.

kip kniskern
ms mvp msn.com

kip
Monday, 27 December 2004 19:19:12 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hello everyone!! Merry Christmas
I'm trying to develop rss reader using C# dotnet
I need that the application let the user subscribes to any rss.
there're two ways the application will give him a list of available rss sites(using a webservice with that information), or the user can add the sites manually writting the rss location.
Also the application should let the user to decide if want to receive notifications of new items or not.
If the user want to now the new items..
i have a problem:
"What I was planning to do: Is to download each rss subscription to the user computer, then periodically compare the rss file in the machine with the one on the web.
but the issue is with what elemen of the rss document should i make the comparison to know if is a new item...
if the only requieres elemnts in a rss item is a title,description and limk.... the date and guid aren't...
or what if in the document online they delete the entire item.. with what i'll compare it..?

thanks in advance!
from Panama!
Marco Len
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