In the article entitled Wonder Why MSN Didn't Think of This?  Mary Jo Foley writes

Or, maybe it has but just has yet to announce it…. On Monday, AOL announced a beta of AIM Sync, a tool that effectively turns Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client into a massive AOL Instant Messaging buddy list.

The implication here is that similar integration of instant messaging presence information does not exist between Outlook and MSN Messenger. This is actually incorrect. This feature exists today in Outlook 2003 and is called the Person Names Smart Tag. Below is a screenshot of my email inbox showing the feature in action.

In fact, this feature is a cause of a common annoyance among users of MSN Messenger and Outlook. Many people have complained that they can't close MSN Messenger if Outlook is running. This is the feature responsible for that behavior. Disabling it removes the dependency between both applications.  

It's good to see yet another of our competitors learning from our innovations.

The past two months was hectic for me at work but things have started to calm down. It's been great learning about the MSN communications infrastructure and working on the design for our next generation of communications services for end users. Of course, now my extracurricular activities have begun to pile up. Below is a brief list of things I plan to begin and/or complete before the end of the month

• Ship the next release of RSS Bandit.
• Create presentation and demo on MSN communications services (Spaces, Hotmail & Messenger) for my appearance at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 and the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium (if my paper is accepted).  
• Write this month's Extreme XML column on MSDN about Processing XML in the Real World.
• Start work on updating my C# from a Java Developer's Perspective article to acknowledge the changes made in Tiger and Whidbey.
• Write the foreword for a certain upcoming book on RSS & Atom.  

I'm sure there is something I've forgotten from this list. Anyway, I am pretty excited about everything on the above list and even moreso about work especially since most of the extracurricular stuff is related to my day job. I guess that turns the Sex & Cash Theory on its head.

Every once in a while I check out the forums on Channel 9 to see what the conversations are happening between Microsoft and its customers. Today I found a post entitled MSNFOUND is so sad... which is in reference to the MSN.:FOUND website. The comments on the site on the Chanel 9 forums seems to be universally negative. Looking a little further, I notice that checking the Bloglines citations for http://www.msnfound.com also results in numerous blog postings about the site whose feedback is primarily negative.

The reasons for this are unsurprising. They were listed in Robert Scoble's blog posting where he lambasted the creators of the site and asked for them to be fired. I agree with most of what Robert wrote in his post. I'd only add one thing, please don't hold this against us. We aren't as stupid as our marketing people make us look.

For the second time in two months I was contacted by a reporter about my blog. Howard Wen has written an article in InternetWeek entitled Blogging About Work is Risky Business on some of the concerns around blogging and the workplace. I referred him to our PR folks for answers to most of his questions but did have some words to say about what guidelines I use when deciding what to post. From the article

For the employee blogger, finding out what one's company policy is toward blogging would be the first step. If the company doesn't have one, or has one that is not exactly clear about the matter of blogging, it may be best to practice a little paranoia.

"I've had my blog postings appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal," Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo says. "So the exhortation to treat blog posts as if they could appear on the cover of a national newspaper is something I keep in mind whenever I write my blog."

Obasanjo keeps two blogs, one on the Microsoft developer network and another on a personal server for non-work-related topics.

I also sent him a link to some of Robert Scoble's blogging guidelines but I guess they didn't make it past editing. My original quote was longer and began with the principle that one should treat one's blog postings as if they were going to appear on the cover of a national newspaper. You never know which one of your posts some reporter or A-list blogger is going to decide to bring to prominence by quoting or linking to it so one should never put anything on their public weblog they wouldn't be comfortable with being read by their friends, family, coworkers as well as thousands of total strangers.

Speaking of reporters, I recently noticed that my blog post on Google Toolbar's AutoLink feature was referenced in the eWeek article Google's Tool Bar Links Stir Debate. Like I said, you never know if or when one of your posts could end up as fodder for a news stories so always think before you post.

As a user of Microsoft products and an employee of the company, I am of two minds about its entrance into the anti-spyware and anti-virus arenas. I agree with the sentiments Michael Gartenburg of Jupiter Research shared in his post Microsoft and Security - Demand if they do and demand if they don't

It's tough to be Microsoft. On one hand, folks insist that security, spyware and virus are issues that they must own. On the other hand, when they do own it and respond, they get dinged for it. Microsoft's decision to get into the business and make these tools available should be lauded. Security is a tough issue that I've written about before and users need to also take on a share of the responsibility of keeping their systems safe. The fact is, even with good solutions on the market, not enough users are protecting their systems and if Microsoft entering the game can help change that, it's a good thing.

Given that spyware is quite likely the most significant problem facing users of Windows I believe that Microsoft has a responsibility to its customers to do something about it. Others may disagree. For example, Robert X. Cringely attacks Microsoft for its recent announcements about getting in the anti-spyware market in his post Killing Us With Kindness: At Microsoft, Even Good Deeds Are Predatory. He writes

How can giving away software tools be bad? Look at how Microsoft is doing it. Their anti-virus and anti-spyware products are aimed solely at users of Windows XP SP2. This has very different effects on both the user base and the software industry. For users, it says that anyone still running Windows 98, ME, or 2000 has two alternatives -- to upgrade to XP/SP2 or to rely on non-Microsoft anti-virus and anti-spyware products. Choosing to upgrade is a 100+ million-unit windfall for Microsoft. That's at least $10 billion in additional revenue of which $9 billion is profit -- all of it coming in the next 12 months.That $10 billion, by the way, comes from you and me, and comes solely because of Microsoft's decision to offer "free" software.

Of course, you can decide not to upgrade to XP/SP2 and rely instead on third-party products to protect your system. But Microsoft has set the de facto price point for such products at zero, zilch, nada. By doing this, they have transferred their entire support obligation for these old products to companies like Symantec and Network Associates without transferring to those companies any revenue stream to make it worth their trouble. Maybe Peter Norton will say, "Screw this, I'm not going to support all these millions of people for nothing." Well, that's Symantec (not Microsoft) apparently forcing users into the same upgrade from which Microsoft (not Symantec) gains all the revenue.
...
Look how this decision transforms Microsoft. By choosing to no longer support a long list of products (is that even legal?), hundreds and perhaps thousands of developers will be switching to new duties. If this were any other company, I would predict layoffs, but a key strategy for Microsoft is hiring the best people simply to keep them from working elsewhere, so I don't think layoffs are likely. What IS likely is an exodus of voluntary departures. What's also likely is that those hundreds or thousands of reassigned developers will be moved to some other doomsday product -- something else for us to eagerly anticipate or fear.

Cringely seems to be confusing supporting old versions of Windows with providing applications that run on current versions of Windows. Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millenium are old versions of Windows whose support life cycle was supposed to end about a year ago but was extended by Microsoft. At the current time, Microsoft will continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems but new applications won't be targetting them but instead will target the current version of Windows for the desktop which is Windows XP.

Microsoft's anti-spyware and anti-virus applications are not an operating system upgrade but instead new applications targetting the current versions of Windows. Even if they were, Windows 98, Windows SE and Windows Millenium are past the stage in their support life cycle where they'd be eligible for such upgrades anyway. Given that Robert X. Cringely is quite familiar with the ways of the software industry I'm surprised that he expects a vendor of shrinkwrapped software to be providing new features to seven year old versions of their software when current versions exist. This practice is extremely uncommon in the software industry. I personally have never heard of such an instance by any company.

While playing Magic:The Gathering with Michael Brundage and a bunch of former co-workers last week he informed me that he had updated his Working At Microsoft essay given some comments and feedback he had seen. Some excerpts from the additions to his essay are included below

Unreality

As a parent, I've come to understand that there's a wide gray area between overprotecting your children and creating a nuturing environment in which they can develop. I think Microsoft struggles with a similar problem with its employees. Microsoft provides its employees with a nuturing environment in which they can be most productive. But like children, these employees also need to be grounded in reality and exposed to ideas that can be disruptive or even disturbing. Otherwise a sheltered monoculture can develop that's unhealthy for everyone involved.

It's hard for people who don't work at Microsoft's main campus to understand just how unreal the experience of working there can become. Some employees forget that most of the world doesn't have broadband wireless networking, high-end consumer electronics, luxury vehicles, and enough money that they don't need to live on a budget. Some employees spend so much time using Microsoft products, that they forget about the competition and/or lose touch with typical customers' needs

...

Microsoft's Not Evil

The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives. People who make wise and foolish decisions. Some employees are bad apples, and some leaders make poor decisions (which their employees may or may not support). Both usually meet with failure. All the Microsoft employees I know are internally driven to "succeed," where success sometimes means outselling the competition but always means doing your personal best and improving people's lives with your work.

Although groups don't have intentions, it's true that group policies reward some kinds of behavior over others. So perhaps "Microsoft is evil" is shorthand for "Microsoft's policies are evil."

The thing is, I haven't seen any evidence of that on the inside and I'm usually very critical of these things. For as long as I've worked at Microsoft, ethics have been a real part of employee performance reviews. It's not just talk, but the way work goes each day. Most product designs revolve around addressing specific customer needs. No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P" or other things that could be construed as "evil." Instead, it's "customers Q and R are having trouble with this, and I have an idea how we could fix it..." and other positive, constructive statements.

If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company. When the media goes wild with knee-jerk reactions for or against something Microsoft did, often the employees responsible for the decision are caught off-guard by the disproportionate public attention.

I came to similar conclusions about Microsoft employees a year or two ago. The main problem with Microsoft employees is not that they are out to 'cut of the air supply' of their competitors. Instead it is that they often make decisions without awareness of the impact their decisions will have on the software industry as a whole. I have often been surprised to realize that some program manager for some new feature or component in some Microsoft product has failed to realize that the entrance of Microsoft in that space could potentially put partners or competitors out of business. This isn't to say that the execs don't realize that Microsoft entering markets usually decimates competition but that a lot of the rank and file guys implementing these decisions or coming up with some of these ideas often don't realize the impact of their actions.

One of the reasons I like working at MSN is that we aren't under any illusions about these issues. We aren't "adding a new feature to Visual Studio to make developers more productive" or "adding some new functionality to Windows to make it more useful for end users" which also happens to have been a thriving ISV market until we decided to enter it. Instead we are directly competing with folks like Yahoo, Google or AOL for a particular market. This situation definitely sits a lot better with me.

The next release of RSS Bandit is scheduled for next month. However we've hit a bit of a snag with regards to translations to langauges other than English. We currently have translators signed up for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Hindi, Turkish, Brazilian Portueguese, and German. The problem is that in the previous version of RSS Bandit we had translations for a larger set of languages but haven't gotten any responses from the original translators for this new version. This means the next version of RSS Bandit may not be localized in Polish, French and Russion even though the previous one was.

If you'd be interested in translating RSS Bandit to your native language or acting as a proof reader for one of our existing translations please contact us at the email address provided below.

Saturday was musuem day for me. I visited both the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. The entrance fee for the Science Fiction Museum $12.95 which is a bit overpriced considering what one gets out of the tour. The musuem is primarily a collection of old science fiction books and magazines as well as props from various movies. Some of the props are quite cool such as the alien queen and Ripley's construction suit from Aliens while others such as the collection of phasers from the various Star Trek movies failed to light my fire. At the end it seemed more like I'd just been shown some geek's private hoard of science fiction memorabilia than I'd been at an actual musuem or hall of fame. I probably would have felt less ripped off if the cover fee was $5 instead of almost $13.

The Museum of Glass was more satisfying although it also felt like it was over too soon. The  Einar and Jamex de la Torre: Intersecting Time and Place was amazing although a bit gory. The artwork by the Torre brothers had demons, exposed human organs and catholic religious relics as a recurring theme. It led to some interesting artwork which I could see some of the parents with younger children had difficulty explaining to their kids. The Solid Cinema: Sculpture by Gregory Barsamian was also impressive. They were mechanical animated pieces illuminated by strobe light. There were only three pieces but they were extremely well done and I spent some time scratching my head trying to figure out how they worked. The Museum of Glass was definitely worth the $10.

The next local museum on my list is the Museum of Flight.

Michael Gartenburg has a blog posting entitled Is Google doing what Microsoft couldn't with their new search bar?  where he writes

As Yogi would say, "it's deja vous, all over again". When Google introduced the newest version if their toolbar, it seems they added a feature that sounds very similar to what Microsoft wanted to do with SmartTags. Apparently the new software will create links in web text that will send you back to Google sites or sites of their choosing. If I recall correctly, there was a huge outcry over the SmartTag feature. Even petitions. How come there is no outcry here? Is it because Google does no evil?

Like I said yesterday, who needs a new browser to do stuff like this when you can co-opt IE with a toolbar?

This is one of the key differences between Google and Microsoft; perception. I am glad to see Google imitating one of Microsoft's innovations from a few years ago. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As can be expected Dave Winer is already on the offensive.

Personally, I can't wait to see how much cognitive dissonance this causes the Slashdot crowd.