Niall Kennedy, of Technorati, has the news that Google will release a feed API in early 2006.

Here’s another note to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie. Hey, I asked you guys to acquire NewsGator three months ago. If you had done that you would have taken the wind out of Google’s sails. But now that Google has a feed API, we’ll need one too and right now NewsGator looks pretty good. Yeah, I know, we have RSS-SSE coming, and we have some Groovy other stuff coming too, but that’s not here yet and it’s hard to get developers excited about a new and unproven API (Google has its work cut out for it too because they don’t have that many RSS users yet. Emphasis on yet).

Yeah, I know that NewsGator has its problems too. Now, we do know that NewsGator’s API is too difficult to use. Why do we know that? Cause Dare Obasanjo (one of our developers who works on MSN Spaces backend and also does the excellent RSS Bandit in his 20% free time) is having troubles figuring it out. Dare writes about the Google news here.

Let’s be honest. We’d rebuild NewsGator from scratch anyway. That’s what big companies usually do after acquiring companies. But, it’s a lot easier to rebuild something that’s already done than have 500 meetings with seven groups figuring out what to do from scratch. What’s the opportunity cost of doing that?

Let’s look at the case for NewsGator again. They own four out of the six most used aggregators. They have the leading Outlook aggregator. Yeah, we’re doing our own in Office 12, but let’s be honest, how long will it be before that gets to more than 50% usage? I’d guess 2010. And even then there are lots of people who’ll still have Outlook 2003, and older Outlook clients, who’ll need to read feeds. Yeah, Attensa is out there with a good competitor too, but Attensa doesn’t have an API. I bet they’ll sign onto Google’s API (or they’ll be bribed with some of Google’s money).

Let’s look at the Mac. NewsGator owns NetNewsWire. It’s the best feed reader on the Mac — by far. Buying NewsGator would rejuvenate our MacBU. The Macintosh is gaining in market share and if Apple announces a nice Intel-based portable computer in January watch things go up even faster.

Now, let’s look at Media Center. A very high percentage of all PCs sold are actually Media Center Editions. Now, who has an aggregator for that? NewsGator again. Why is that important? Well, look at Chris Pirillo’s house. He has an HDTV in his family room. He has an Xbox 360. And he has a Media Center in his office. What was one of the first things he showed me? His Media Center playing on his Xbox’s screen. Now, imagine if NewsGator was pulling down podcasts. If it was going off to the BBC and pulling in pictures and news. If it were going to his Flickr feeds and pulling down his friend’s photos in live time.

Now, switch over to my sooopppeerrr doooopppeeerrr new SmartPhone. Who has an aggregator for that? A few companies, but NewsGator has a Web service that shows me feeds. I like it a lot.

OK, now we are still a company that cares about regular old Windows, right? After all, we’re shipping a new version of Windows next year. So, who has the best aggregator for Windows? NewsGator again. With FeedDemon.

To put a little icing on the cake, NewsGator is the only RSS syndication system that hooks into Microsoft Exchange that I know about.

You’re not on any of these? Well, did you know NewsGator also has a Web client that’s getting raves? I like it better than Bloglines (which is one of the popular feed readers that NewsGator doesn’t own).

Oh, and here’s even more icing: on top of all this NewsGator does blog search and does it better than many of the more popular “blog search” engines. Why? Cause it searches YOUR feeds (which don’t include all the blog spam that hit other engines).

All this stuff is synchronized. Read a feed on your Mac, it marks it as read on Windows, and on SmartPhone, on the Web, on the Media Center, and in Outlook.

Anyway, if you were Bill/Steve/Ray what company would you want to acquire?

Rick Segal, venture capitalist, complains about MSDN subscriptions and says that Microsoft isn’t eating enough dog food. OK, that’s definitely something I’m going to work on in 2006. It’s why I’m playing a lot more with our latest stuff this holiday.

Oh, and Rick, please don’t hire away Jerry Ding. We need all the customer-focused people we can get!

I agree with Liz Lawley, this is a great Honda ad. Here’s why it’s great: it’s aspirational (translation, it makes you feel good) and it shows you their products being used.

I wish Microsoft’s ads were as good (the Xbox ones are close, at least they make you feel good).

Brandon says that nothing he does will get his blog into Google. Let’s see if this does it. Microsoft Desktop Search blog.

Oh, and Brandon, can you help me get Glass running on my Toshiba M200? I can’t figure it out. Julian Kay shows why it rocks. (Brandon says in other comments here that all I have to do is load the LDDM driver, where is that sucker? I tried a bunch of different drivers but none give me glass).

Rafe Colburn says he’s gone soft on Microsoft. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. What good are blogs to Microsoft? Well, OK, we’ve put a human face on the borg. Wonderful. But what’s next?

To me I think something deeper happened in 2005. You can now talk to Microsoft’s employees directly. Here, go to Google. I use Google cause that’s what most of you are using. It works just as well on MSN or Yahoo, though.

Pick a product of ours. Add the word “blog” and you’ll probably find an employee who is blogging from that team and look at the top link. Here, let’s try a few.

Update: I decided to see how MSN and Google compared on these results. Interesting that Google values individual webloggers higher, but MSN puts team blogs higher.

Office 12 blog (same search on MSN). Google pulls up Jensen Harris. Google and MSN are same.
Flight Simulator blog (same search on MSN). Here Google doesn’t do as well (MSN Search does slightly better). I was hoping it’d pull up Steve Lacey, developer on the Flight Simulator team. Or one of the 12 Flight Simulator blogs that Steve links to.
OneNote blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up Chris Pratley. Google and MSN are same here.
Xbox blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up John Porcaro. MSN is better here.
BizTalk blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up Scott Woodgate. Google is better here for top result, but MSN is better for other results.
Windows Vista blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up the IE team’s blog and John Montgomery. Google is better here.
Sharepoint blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up John West and Ryan Rogers. Google is better here.
Infopath blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up the InfoPath team blog. Google and MSN are same.
IE blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up the IE team’s blog. Google and MSN are same.
FrontPage blog (same search on MSN) pulls up an MVP’s blog in top position, but Rob Mauceri’s FrontPage blog is close to the top. MSN is better here than Google.
Microsoft Live Blog (same search on MSN). Pulls up the Live team’s blog. Google’s better here than MSN.

That’s significant. There are very few companies in the world where you can search for the product name and find someone who works on that team and is communicating about it and listening to customers.

I used to be an MVP. I used to hate that there were intermediaries between me and the people who built the products. If I thought a product sucked, I wanted to tell that team directly AND I wanted to be sure that team saw my feedback. Back in the 1990s my only option was to go to a newsgroup or a CompuServe forum and leave my feedback there. I had no idea whether anyone saw my feedback that actually worked on the team. Yeah, once in a while I’d see a Microsoft employee show up, but I really had no idea who they were. Interns? Temps? Someone in product support?

Or, I could always try the email route. Send email feedback to mswish@microsoft.com. What’s funny about that is I’ve worked at Microsoft for 2.5 years and I STILL don’t know who reads that email.

But, now, if I care enough to tell a team their products/services/technologies suck, I just go to a search engine and add the word “blog” onto the end of the product name and I have a pretty good chance of finding someone who actually cares about their product enough to write a blog.

So, in 2006, where is this going? Better products because now you know where to leave a comment and who is responsible.

Is there a team you’d like to see blog that isn’t yet? We’ll bug that team in public to start one.

Which, brings me to why this works. Social pressure. Nothing works better to get a company to change. Nothing. If there’s a company you don’t like, write about it. If they are listening, they’ll respond. If not, well, at least you’ve warned everyone else not to do business with them.

I meet a lot of geeks and talk about a lot of things, but lately I’ve been hearing “Scott Guthrie is my favorite Microsoft guy” lately a lot more. Here Shawn Wildermuth, the ADO.NET guy, says just that. What earned Shawn’s praise? The Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project Preview that Scott put up.

Ray Ozzie sent me and Irish podcaster Tom Raftery some email at 6 a.m. on Christmas eve. Was that a way to tell those kids over at Google that “we can work even longer hours than you do?” Heheh.

Then he wrote a blog post. Turns out he’s testing the new Treo. Being CTO of Microsoft does have its privileges!

When showing my phone around I actually get a lot of questions about whether or not to go with a keyboard-style phone. Here’s why I don’t: I used to have a Blackberry (back when I worked at Fawcette) and I used it so much that my hands hurt. Really hurt. I lost my Blackberry in a cab in New Orleans and my pain went away. I realized then that it was the thumb keyboard that was causing my hands to hurt. Let’s face it, I was addicted to that thing (and this was before blogging, imagine if I could post from my phone!)

So, now, I avoid any device that has a mini keyboard. Why? Because it’s too hard to use T9 to type emails or blog posts. I can read them just fine, but replying is hard so I wait until I’m on my Tablet PC and have a wifi connection.

Here’s a tip, though. If you want me to call you back make sure you put your phone number on your email post. Make sure, also, to put hyphens to connect the numbers, like this: 1-425-205-1921. Outlook on SmartPhones automatically turns that number into a clickable one, so it’s very easy to call you.

Ahh, as Om Malik says, it’s a slow news day so rumors are running wild on the blogs. Is or isn’t Microsoft buying Opera? I have no freaking idea either way, but didn’t the Riya deal teach us anything? That rumors are just that — at least until the deal is signed? All the key players are on vacation right now, though, so I doubt something is up.

Ever try to land a 747? Me neither, but over on the AVSIM forum a member posted pictures of his hard landings. That comes to me from Jason Waskey’s blog. He’s an art lead on the team that does Flight Simulator, among other things. Obviously his blog covers lots of stuff related to simulators and game art. His blog is one of the better Microsoft blogs. Tells you why things don’t work the way they should (one of his posts tells you why bridges would end halfway across a river, for instance).

This is Channel 9’s Christmas Present to geeks everywhere. A candid conversation with the team that’s building Windows Vista’s kernel. I even ask if they wish the registry had never been invented. But, Charles Torre did most of the interviewing. Being in a room with these guys for an hour makes my brain hurt.

They give a lot of details about how they are rearchitecting Windows to make it easier to ship new, higher-quality, versions of the OS.

I don’t remember any conference where these four people get together and just have a simple conversation. In 2006 I’m going to push for even more corporate transparency into why we do the things we do. Since much of the world has bet on our products, shouldn’t the world have better conversations with the folks who build those products?

Think about the impact on the world these four people have. If there are going to be hundreds of millions of people using Windows Vista (and that’s if it’s a market failure), and these four people find a way to increase computer speeds even a few seconds a day (or do something similarly impressive to increase productivity), imagine the economic impact of that.

Happy Holidays from building 18 on Microsoft’s headquarters! Hope you have a good one!

Update, I wish I were back in Belgium with this Nine Guy.