Mini-Microsoft has gone on sabbatical (although not really) and Robert Scoble has left for a startup. Who is left around to carry the torch...? Well, let me take a moment, walk a few blocks and hold it up.

Today's announcement by Bill Gates was all about making a safe, zero risk, predictable move.

Yippee.

During the press conference every Microsoft employee got an email today from Steve Ballmer. Unfortunately, I read it after reading Guy Kawasaki's The Top Sixteen Lies of CEOs and quite frankly Steve's words ring hollow. I think Steve has good intentions -- but the stock price is speaking way louder at the moment. I also think he has PR folks helping him a bit too much.

Friendly piece of advice for him: Steve, stop by any cafeteria in any given building each day and each lunch with a group of 3 or 4 Joe or Jane Microsofties and engage them in conversation. If you do, people will begin to believe in the magic again.

Anywho, here are the sort of announcements which would have made a favorable impression on me...

1) BillG is coming back full time to lead us through the current / next round of competitive pressures.

Let's face it, Sergey and Larry probably smell blood in the water right now. I'm not sure the competitive tenacity, desire or hunger to win is present in the resultant executive team lineup announced today (nothing really changed now, or in two years: it's still status quo). It's clearly in Bill's DNA to compete -- and we need that now more than ever.

2) J Allard has assumed the role of Chief Software Architect.

Please, please -- anyone closer to 40 as a CxO would be nice. Do the math on the average age of our executive team and cringe. Yes, with age comes wisdom -- but sometimes a tendency to think you've got it all figured out (I'm learning this on a nearly daily basis these days). IBM never planned to be supplanted by the young, upstart Microsoft.

3) Microsoft will be broken up into multiple companies.

It doesn't matter how you slice or dice it -- any company with 70,000 employees is going to have way more chiefs than indians. Don't split it as the courts wanted to with Windows as one company and Office as another. Split it up into granular pieces with the explicit goal of having them compete with each other. Fork the code after we ship Windows Vista and carve out competitive landscapes (where the Windows designed for small businesses can start chipping away at the Windows designed for medium sized businesses, and vice versa, as but one example). Instead of acquisitions, let's have some spinoffs.

4) Windows Vista will be available for Holiday 2006.

Yeah, I know, this one is a long shot. But this kind of 'all hands on deck' whereby the entire company is invested in accelerating (not delaying) the shipment of Windows Vista could be catalyzing. Getting everyone to drop everything for the next month and concentrate on nothing but Windows Vista would send a clear message we mean business.

So where does all of this leave me professionally...?

Honestly, I'm not really sure at the moment. I'm pretty sure I'm still going to stick around. I believe there is still enough time and strength to pull us out of the morass, turn the ship around and head us in the right direction.

Of this I'm sure: If it's to be, it has to start with me.

Pixels, Megapixels, and Desktop Resolutions points me to a wikipedia entry on desktop resolutions. One of the things that most excites me about MCML is it enables your designed-for-10' experience to work on all of these resolutions without explicitly needing to code for any of them.

With lot's of great pictures of the user interface...

Review: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/index.php?p=71

Picture Gallery: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?page_id=70

Definitely worth your time to read. I ribbed him about coining the phrase 'Blue Screen of DRM'.

My brother Evan has taken up the blogging mantle and is posting about the trade show industry, displays in particular. His most recent post includes popular references geeks will grok: Star Wars and Star Trek.

Check it out at http://trade-show-display-booths.blogspot.com/

Hopefully my link to his blog will give him the first bit of Google / Yahoo / MSN Search juice, which is mui importante to marketing a product.

I went to fill up the gas tank in the truck the other day for nearly $70, and the tank wasn't competely empty. At $3+ per gallon it's looking more and more attractive to ride a bike to work. It saves on wear and tear on the vehicle, plus it's good for the whole cardio vascular thing, and good for the environment (unless I eat bean burritos for lunch). It's about 9.4 miles door to door, so I think it can be done in under an hour.

There is also the combo mass transit + bike which might help me ease into the rhythm. I'm thinking I would pretty much suck wind and be worthless at work if I tried to make the trip today -- I'll admit I'm horribly out of shape.

Can anyone recommend a good bicycle shop in / around the Eastside area...?

Oh, and if you happen to have a touring / commuter bike appropriate for a 6'3" male (58-59 cm frame size) you aren't using, give me a shout -- I might be interested.

Check this out: http://blog.itvt.com/my_weblog/2006/04/schematic_demos.html

Things are beginning to shake out quite nicely with Windows Media Center Presentation Layer Applications.

Francis Hogle (Development Manager for the Windows Media Center team) is back with the second of his four part series which explains how the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer works in greater detail. Check it out...

A Quick Peek Under the Hood - Part Two of Four

http://discuss.mediacentersandbox.com

I'm LOVING Office 12, especially Microsoft Access (long time fan, have used since Access 1.0 -- no, really). And things are running pretty darn solid. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to the faint of heart, but I'm not being blocked from accomplishing any work -- and in a couple of ways I can already see how productivity will get a boost with the combination of Windows Vista + Office 12.

I don't mean to sound like a PR person here -- we still do have a significant amount of work left to accomplish -- but things are *definitely* coming together.

Heck, I might just go nuts tonight and install Adobe Creative Suite (v1) to see what happens.

Update: I just showed my wife Microsoft Word 12. Her comment right off the bat: 'It looks like space, the final frontier'. That really cracked me up (and made me think we are *really* on the right track).

Update 2: Adobe Photoshop runs like a champ without skipping a beat.

I've been watching the buzz go around from the screenshots I posted the other day (here). One thing I forgot to note in the post is the desktop wallpaper image (leaves with water droplets on them) was taken by yours truly while on a hike at Deception Falls. It's not shipping with Windows Vista.

But I've seen several comments where folks want this image for their own desktop -- happy to oblige.

Just leave a comment here with your native resolution and I'll crop the image as appropriate and post for folks to download and use.

Update: Here they are -- note these are barely compressed -- I like my desktop backgrounds very sharp, crisp and clean.  For best results in Windows Vista, make sure you use the proper image for your native resolution and select the 'Fit to screen' positioning option in the for the Desktop Background control panel.

1280 x 800 (2.85 MB) | 1280 x 1024 (3.62 MB) | 1366 x 768 (1.75 MB) | 1680 x 1050 (4.64 MB) | 1600 x 1200 (5.1 MB) | 1920 x 1200 (5.92 MB)

If you are running the February CTP Refresh (5342) use this image as your Desktop Background, take a screenshot of your desktop and post to your blog with a permalink back here -- it will be fun to see how folks configure their desktops in Windows Vista (and how far around the world the image goes).