I Will Be Assimilated

Like Captain Picard beaming down to the Borg ship, next week I will be flying to Redmond, home of the main Microsoft Campus.
I'm a long time CNE, so I make the trip with much trepidation. We're involved in the TAP program for a new product, and I'm excited about the possibilities of having actual input into how this thing comes together. It has the potential to fundamentally change the way we do IT here.
I thought about Microsoft, oddly enough, when I was in Colorado last week. (And, BTW, now I know what John Denver was all worked up about. I'll post later on the Cornbelt Kid's first veiw of mountains.) We were looking at merging in another, much smaller company. I was playing the Corporate Cheerleader, listing all the benefits we could bring them from an IT standpoint just by sheer budget and staff numbers. And that brought M$oft to mind. They surpassed Novell because they new how to market, not because thier product was any better. Now they have the power to throw hundreds if not thousands of coders at a project, and millions of dollars. It's finally starting to pay off in terms of usability and stability. I'm even willing to say that thier Directory Services is finally up to the task of handling larger corporations. If they can just get past the Feature Bloat that they think has to come with every new version, I'll be happy.
I'll try to blog at least a couple of times from Redmond to give an outsiders veiw of the inside. Stay tuned.