Robert, stop conversing with the market and start shipping something that people can actually use. Neither Apple nor Google converse much with the market and both are doing quite well, from what I see.

That said, since you wanted a conversation, forget about RSS for a minute and get your fundamentals right — that means Mail. Calendaring. (My MSN, thankfully, is in much better shape.) I pay $20 a year for Hotmail and it’s embarassing that it still doesn’t have autocomplete, or that last I checked it won’t allow me to save a message into my Sent Items folder unless I click a checkbox. Every freaking time. You invented Ajax. Great. Use it. Time was when IE4-powered DHTML ran circles around NS4. Why are you ceding the space to Firefox today? And if you’ve got people who can make start.com, why are they kept in a sandbox and not allowed to touch the rest of MSN?

The way I see it, Microsoft has taken a strategic decision that Firefox and LAMP have commoditized the web so it’s time to cut losses, stop spending millions on IE and squeeze profits out of the fraction of users who will pay to have a marginally richer ‘integrated’ experience (with IE7 and XAML). Prove me wrong. Ship something to show me Microsoft still cares about putting great, usable apps on the web.

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Is Project Aardvark a remote desktop service that works through firewalls using an HTTP-based reflector, like GoToMyPC and MyWebexPC, given some of the hints the Aardvark team has been dropping? Given the team’s working with a lot of GPL code, maybe they’re extending VNC?

Incidentally, I find myself using MyWebexPC a lot these days and it’s quite good (and the basic version’s free for upto 5 PCs) … if you find yourself working on several machines, you might want to give it a try.

Update: Hadn’t noticed this: Michael Still has discovered what Aardvark is: SidePilot, a service that allows ‘people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by temporarily controlling their computers via the Internet’.

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I’ve linked to posts about Europe before and as you might realize I am not the biggest fan of the European Social Model. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’d love longer vacations and shorter workweeks as much as the next man but the results the European Model has produced are nothing short of alarming: an aging population, a looming pensions crisis and double-digit unemployment alone make for a gloomy picture before unintegrated immigrants/minorities are added to create an explosive mix.

So it’s with some relief that I see Brown (yesterday) and Blair (today) have stepped up to give the EU a reality check. At a time when the EU leadership is busy papering over the reality of two popular thumbs-downs (cue Juncker’s ‘they didn’t really vote No’), someone had to point out that the EU was fixating on the past with its focus on protectionism and subsidy in a world of ever-competitive nations.

Let’s hope Europe’s people are listening, for many of their leaders will not.

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