From Omar Shahine's post mail.start.com we learn

Well, we launched Kahuna Milestone 3 (M3) yesterday with a new URL (http://mail.start.com). We are building Kahuna iteratively, and plan on releasing much goodness on a frequent basis. This is very different from the way that Hotmail and MSN has typically released software, but we feel it’s the best way to achieve success.

As I mentioned recently I've been using the Hotmail beta for a while now and it's a phenomenal improvement over the current version. Below is a screenshot of the beta in action.

If you'd like invites to the beta, you should keep an eye on the Hotmail team's space. You can also find more screenshots of the Hotmail beta on their space as well.

I got an email about Six Apart's Project Comet yesterday and it definitely made me smile. It's good to see more validation of the idea that personal publishing (weblogging) should evolve into personal self expression (my blog, my photos, my relationships, my media, etc). This is the same direction taken by services such as MySpace, MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360°.

Weblogs are replacing the personal homepage and thus to reflect all the facets of one's personality, they need to be more than 'my online journal'. Most of the big vendors in this space have cottoned onto this idea slowly but surely. I wonder when the coin will drop over in the Blogger offices at Google.

I've been participating in the inaugural podcast for the Microsoft Architecture series. From the website

ARCast is an ongoing podcast series created by the Architect Strategy Team with the goal of spawning insightful, enlightening and sometimes contentious conversations about the hottest topics in Architecture today

The topic for the first series of podcasts are the problems facing interoperability in web services today. The participants are myself, Jeffrey Schlimmer, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Roger Sessions, and Chris Haddad. Most of the discussion has been about adoption of WS-* which even though I work on web services that are utilized by millions of people every day, I've never really found the technologies outside the core XML web services standards (SOAP/WSDL/XSD) to be of much importance to our main scenarios.

Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it's not very sexy and it won't get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.

They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it's depressing and not fun and doesn't have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don't know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that -- unless we start paying very serious attention -- it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

By Joshua Ellis, found via Jamie Zawinski.

A few days ago I mentioned in my post, Microsoft's Innovation Pipeline, that I suspect that a lot of folks at Microsoft will be looking to try something new after working on large software projects that in some cases have taken 3 to 5 years to ship. I personally have had conversations with half a dozen people over the last month or so who are either looking for something new or have found it.

In his post, Something New, Derek Denny-Brown writes

What kept me at Microsoft, and what I will miss the most, is the people. I worked with such diverse collection of wonderful people... mostly. Not that you can't get that elsewhere, but the 'individual contributors' (as they are called at MS) are really one of Microsoft's assets. I felt like a I was leaving my family. I have worked with some of these people for my entire time at Microsoft. That is a long, and intense, time to build a friendship.

I've had almost everyone I know ask me "why I are you leaving?" Some factors: Whidbey is basically done, as is Yukon. Microsoft definitely is more bureaucratic that it used to be, as well. Mostly though, it was just time to move on. I was presented with an opportunity that fit my interests. (And no, I'm not going to Google... too big. I decided long ago, that if I was going to leave, I wanted it to be for a small company, something less than 100 people.)

Derek is a good friend and I'll hate to see him leave. At least he's staying in Seattle so we'll still get to hang out every couple of weekends. I didn't try really hard to pitch him on coming to MSN but after a second friend [who hasn't posted to his blog about leaving yet] told me he was leaving the company I've switched tactics. All my friends are getting the pitch now. :)

There are two videos about MSN's AJAX efforts on Channel 9 today.

1. Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail "Kahuna": Hundreds of millions of people use Hotmail. Here's the first look at the next-generation of Hotmail, code-named "Kahuna."
   
   You meet the team which is located at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus, hear their design philosophy, and get a first look.

2. Scott Isaacs - MSN DHTML Foundation unveiled: Scott Isaacs is one of the inventors of DHTML. He is one of Microsoft's smartest Web developers and built a framework that's being used on Start.com, the future Hotmail, and other places like the new gadgets in Windows Vista. Hope you enjoy meeting Scott, sorry for the bad lighting at the beginning. If you've done any AJAX development, you'll find this one interesting and you'll get a look at some bleeding-edge Web development that MSN is doing.
   

I've been using the Hotmail beta and it is definitely hot. My girlfriend saw me using it and when I told her that was the next version of Hotmail she told me to send hugs and kisses to the Hotmail team. Kudos to Omar, Aditya, Steve Kafka, Imran, Walter, Reeves and all the other folks at Hotmail who're making Kahuna happen.

Additionally it looks like I'll be working on Hotmail features in our next release. So maybe I'll get some of those hugs and kisses next time. ;)

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 20, 2005 — In order to drive greater agility in the execution of its software and services strategy, Microsoft Corp. today announced a realignment of the company into three newly formed divisions, each of which will be led by its own president.  The Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division will be led by Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin as co-presidents; Jeff Raikes has been named president of the Microsoft Business Division; and Robbie Bach has been named as president of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division. In addition, the company said Ray Ozzie will expand his role as chief technical officer by assuming responsibility for helping drive its software-based services strategy and execution across all three divisions.

The company also announced that Allchin plans to retire at the end of calendar year 2006 following the commercial availability of Windows Vista™, the next-generation Microsoft^® Windows^® operating system....

Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division

Johnson will succeed Allchin, taking ownership of the Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, which comprises Windows Client, Server and Tools, and MSN^®. To ensure a smooth transition, Johnson and Allchin will serve as co-presidents until Allchin’s retirement next year. The new division’s mission is to enable exciting user experiences and drive customer value through continued innovation in the software platform and software services delivered over the Internet.

"We are focused on creating exciting user experiences and enabling developers to build great applications with the combination of software and software-based services," Ballmer said. "Our MSN organization has great expertise in innovating quickly and delivering software-based services at scale. The platform groups have great expertise in creating a software platform and user experience that touches millions of people. By combining these areas of expertise, we will deliver greater value to our customers. David Cole, senior vice president, will continue to lead MSN, reporting to Johnson.

It seems I was wrong about how long it would take MSN to become more like Windows. The fun thing about Microsoft is that just when you think you have the org chart figured out, we have a reorg.  :)

In a recent interview with Business Week, Microsoft's CEO stated

We certainly have the best pipeline of new innovation [over the next 12 months] we've ever had in our history.

I was thinking about that line on my drive back from work yesterday and I think he has a point. Over the next year or so Microsoft is going to ship Windows Vista, Office 12, IE 7, Visual Studio 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework v2.0, Windows Communications Foundation (Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Xbox 360 as well as the next iterations of various offerings from the MSN division including Hotmail, MSN Spaces, MSN Messenger, MSN Virtual Earth, Start.com, etc. That's a lot of stuff and is probably more stuff than has ever shipped in a 12 - 18 month time period in the company's history.

I suspect that one of the interesting consequences of this will be a significant diffusion of talent across the company and perhaps across the industry. A lot of people have been working on a big pieces of software for several years and will be looking for something new. The most restless have already started moving around (e.g. I went from the XML team to MSN, Joshua went from the XML team to Internet Explorer via the Passport team, and Michael went from the XML team to XBox). I've started having more conversations with folks interested in a change and I expect this will only increase over the next 12 months. Definitely interesting times ahead.

On an unrelated note, I have updated the track of the week from my high school days on my space. Just click on the play button on the Windows Media player module to hear this week's track.

Below is an excerpt from a transcript of an interview with Bill Gates by Jon Udell during last week's Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC).

JU: So a few people in the audience spontaneously commented when they saw the light version of the presentation framework, I heard the words "Flash competitor" in the audience. Do you think that's a fair observation? And do you think that that's potentially a vehicle for getting Avalon interfaces onto not just devices but non-Windows desktops? To extend the reach of Avalon that way?

BG: From a technology point of view, what the Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere thing does -- I think it was called Jolt internally. It overlaps what Flash does a lot. Now, I don't think anybody makes money selling lightweight presentation capability onto phones and devices and stuff like that. We're making this thing free, we're making it pervasive. I don't think anybody's business model is you get a bunch of royalties for a little presentation runtime. So there'll certainly be lots of devices in the world that are going to have Flash and they're going to have this WPF/E -- which they say they're going to rename, but that's the best they could do for now -- there'll be lots of devices that have both of those, but they don't conflict with each other. It's not like a device maker say -- oh my god, do I pick Flash, do I pick WPF/E? You can have both of those things and they co-exist easily. They're not even that big.

JU: And it's a portable runtime at this point, so is it something that conceivably takes XAML apps to a Mac desktop or a Linux desktop? Is that a scenario?

BG: The Mac is one of the targets that we explicitly talked about, so yes. Now it's not 100 percent of XAML, we need to be clear on that. But the portion of XAML we've picked here will be everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. And it has to be. You've got to have, for at least reading, and even some level of animation, you've got to have pervasiveness. And will there be multiple things that fit into that niche? Probably. Because it's not that hard to carry multiple...you as a user don't even know when you're seeing something that's WPF/E versus Flash versus whatever. It just works.

One of my concerns when it came to the adoption of the the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon) has been the lack of cross platform/browser support. A couple of months ago, I wrote about this concern in my post The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat Itself When it Comes to Adoption of XAML/Avalon?. Thus it is great to see that the Avalon folks have had similar thoughts and are working on a cross-platform story for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

I spoke to one of the guys behind WPF/E yesterday and it definitely looks like they have the right goals. This will definitely be a project to watch.

I have to agree with Robert Scoble that Google's blog search not as good at link searching.

The only feature I use the various blog search engines like Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket and Google Blog Search for is looking for references to my posts which may not have shown up in my referer logs. Therefore, the only feature I care about is link searching and my main quality criteria is how fresh the index is. Here, Bloglines Citations Search is head and shoulders above everything else out there today. I've been using the various blog search engines every day for the past few weeks and Bloglines is definitely at the head of the pack.

Compare and contrast,

1. http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog 

2. http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

3. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=link:www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

4. http://www.technorati.com/search/www.25hoursaday.com/weblog