"Aren't you a little tall for a Storm Trooper?"

Any blog that opens with that line has gotta be interesting.

http://port25.technet.com/ is where it's at.

Today is the second birthday of Channel 9. I can't believe time has gone so quickly. Today, we put up a video with Anders Vinberg, architect of Microsoft's management infrastructure team. Charles did this one with me playing camera guy. So far there are 760 videos. When I look through the people I've met along this journey it's just amazing.

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft who has supported us. Who knew that millions of people (our traffic is going nuts lately) would show up to watch shaky videos done by a guy with a goofy laugh. Not to mention that you can post "Microsoft sucks" underneath any of our videos and we won't pull that down.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in our forums, or added to our wikis, or sent a postcard in to get a Channel 9 guy.

It's been an interesting conversation. I wonder where it'll lead to next.

I love it when regular old geeks who don't work at Microsoft build cool community sites for our products. Ultranauts is a good one! Just wanted to say thanks! Can't wait until I get my ultra mobile PC, although Maryam is mad at me for spending money we don't have (er, running up the credit cards) on gadgets so might have to wait a while. Sigh.

I'm in a lot better mood lately cause I am back home doing the Channel 9 thing. Interviewing Microsoft folks about what they do. Sometimes the interviews give me an interesting look at how the software industry is changing underneath our feet.

Consider these two faces of Microsoft.

I interviewed Bill Gallagher yesterday. He's worked at Microsoft for 15 years as of tomorrow. Congrats, it always amazes me when I meet anyone who's been at the same company for that many years. When he started Microsoft was building its eighth building in Redmond, he worked most of that time in building #2 as a tester in Windows.

Bill is decidedly old school. He knows where the bodies are buried. Well, that's a metaphor for knowing why things were built the way they are. He's always been in the test side of the house and today runs a test team on mobile PCs. You know, Origamis, Tablet PCs, and laptops.

His knowledge of the OS is deep. He has access to all the Windows source code so his teams can figure out why something isn't working. So why do I call him "old school?" Well, Windows is definitely complex and isn't something that a single person can any longer keep in their heads (he says maybe Dave Culter still has most of it in his head, but there aren't very many Dave Cutlers anymore, he says). But, even so, the system is fairly understandable and if you have enough time you can dig through the various pieces of Windows and sort of understand what's going on. Certainly you know the version of the components you're dealing with. You know where they reside on the hard drive. You can see the segments of memory they are writing to. And all that.

Now, compare that kind of OS to the one that Emre Kiciman is working on.

Emre is one of Microsoft's newest employees. He just graduated with a PhD from Stanford University. Now, if you know anything about the world of software engineering and the software/tech business you know that Stanford is the #1 place in the world. It's where Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Yahoo, Google, and many other companies were formed.

When I know someone has graduated from Stanford I can make some assumptions: 1) They are freaking smart. Why do I know that? Cause only one guy from my high school class got accepted into Stanford and he was definitely the smartest kid we had. They turned down rafts of other kids who also had 4.0s and were also very smart. 2) That even someone at the bottom of their class in Stanford could go to any company they wanted and/or could start their own company.

Emre didn't break my assumptions. Nice. Humble. Smart. Freaking smart. The kind of smarts I wish I had. I asked him why he didn't go to Google. Heheh. Answer to that later.

Anyway, he's doing large system research. His "OS" runs on thousands of machines. His data that he's studying is terabytes of log files kicked out of MSN's servers every day. Every day. Think about that one for a while.

His OS? Is totally abstracted. He has no idea what each machine is running in the data centers he's looking at. He has no idea what hard drive a file is sitting on. Or even what machine. He's looking at making the overall system work better. He's looking for patterns of machine behavior BETWEEN machines. He and his teams are looking for network behaviors. Why does the Internet get a little wonky once in a while? What can be done about it?

These two guys, if you put them in the same room, don't speak the same language. They don't understand each other. One guy looks for memory leaks. Works in C++, or C, or some assembler. Deals with a single machine (a laptop or a Tablet PC) and has deep understanding of how that works.

The other guy deals with SQL Server. C#. Terabytes of data. No real understanding of individual machines. Looking at systems of machines.

Emre says that sometime soon you'll have dozens of machines in your home that work in conjunction with other data centers all over the world. A totally distributed OS. You are getting a small look into this world if you use Bittorrent or other P2P apps. Or, everytime you pull up Google, Yahoo, MSN or even Wordpress. Do you know which machine in Wordpress' data center you are reading my blog off of today? Matt Mullenweg doesn't either.

It isn't often that you get to see the shift in software so clearly. I'll get the videos up in a few weeks so you can see the differences for yourself.

So, why did Emre come to Microsoft? He wanted to work on really large data sets and he wanted to work for the best research lab in the world. He said he did his homework and looked into all the companies that are doing this kind of work and says Microsoft is — by far — the leader in his mind.

Who am I to argue with a Stanford PhD?

Manuel Clement is a famous technologist (he used to speak at the FlashForward conferences, now works at Microsoft) but that's not what this video is about. At home he's a musician and has a basement of cool stuff in his basement. It's interesting that many programmers are also musicians. Anyone else have a basement like Manuel's?

Manuel has more on his blog where you can download music and visit his community site named "Future Producers."

Apple today announced Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows XP on one of those new Macintoshes. Very interesting! The bloggers go wild!

You know, it seems to me that Apple gets blogging even though they don't encourage most of their employees to blog. They see bloggers ask for things and they deliver. Bloggers then go wild.

Apple, in its MacWorld booth back in January made a big deal about podcasting and blogging.

They certainly are understanding how to use blogs to listen to their customers.

And, yes, I +am+ jealous.

On the other hand there are some at Microsoft who are listening too. Atlas, new developer technology that helps developers use Visual Studio to build ASP.NET applications, came straight off of feedback on blogs.

Does Apple need blogs? Not if it keeps responding to what bloggers want.

And, yes, I'm very tempted to buy a MacBook.

Dang, seems like the whole world is talking about those damn Chevy ads. You know the ones that everyday people posted. The ones that made fun of Chevy's SUVs. The ones that derided a global macrobrand. The ones that supposedly have caused Chevy a whole bunch of bad PR.

It got me to think about Chevy all day long. I wasn't thinking about my Ford Focus and how it successfully went 25,000 miles (passed that point on Sunday without even a rattle). I wasn't thinking about the tax man. Or my next video I need to edit.

No, I was thinking about Chevy. And wondering what General Motors was thinking about this whole shindig. Did the bloggers get GM?

I was hoping to learn more, so I headed over to Bob Lutz' General Motors blog (he's an executive there). He hasn't reacted yet.

Bummer. But, maybe they (being GM's PR team) watched Shel and I debate with a CTO of a public company last week and decided they didn't any part of this.

So, I wonder what my reaction would be if my videos were taken and turned into an anti-Microsoft commercial?

I'd be happy!

Whoa?

Well, bloggers only make fun of companies and people that are doing interesting things. You don't see them picking on companies that don't have a big market position, do you?

The day that bloggers stop poking you with a big stick is the day that your brand and market position have become small and boring.

It's like the day when people start rooting for the Yankees. The day they come in last place five years in a row. Then I'll start feeling sorry for them and start rooting for them. And, even then, if they have the largest payroll in baseball I'll probably be rooting against them.

As a blogger I forget this all the time. Get too emotional when people attack me or my company.

It's the day they STOP attacking me and Microsoft that I'm not looking forward to.

Kudos to General Motors for trying an advertising campaign that was different. That broke through the clutter. That made people think and talk. That made people have a conversation with you (even if it is an unpleasant one).

Now, what'll be interesting to see is if GM continues the conversation or remains silent.

There are lots of small, secret groups around Microsoft. As soon as I hear about them I beg to come over with my camcorder and find out more about what they are doing. Ric Merrifield's Motion Initiative is one such "incubation team." Turns out his charter was to go and study businesses. So, he and a small team of researchers spread out across the globe and started making a map of how business works. They've been working over the past few years and that work led to identifying underserved software markets and led directly to the acquisition of Navision. Interesting look into how Microsoft is trying to learn new things about markets it isn't yet in.

Brand consultancy Millward Brown Optimor named Microsoft the most powerful global brand.

And, no, blogging didn't have anything to do with this. Or, did it? GHurlman's blog comments about how Scott Guthrie read his blog and took care of his problem.

How is a great brand built? One customer at a time. What's the ROI of this? Who the heck cares!

Microsoft announces Linux support for Virtual Server 2005 R2. Tristan Louis says "What we are seeing here is nothing short of a major revolution at Microsoft."