Dear Bill G: one more thing

Letter to Bill Gates:

Dear Bill

I realize that in the run up to your retirement from Microsoft you've probably got a thousand things on your mind. You're leaving a legacy unparalleled in computing history but there is one more thing you could do that would put an emphatic and indelible stamp on the industry you love.

Please get the Live Writer team to release the product cross platform and at least available for Mac. It would be nice if it could be made available for Linux and Ubuntu as well. Rumors are that some of your incredibly smart developers have been doing a little skunk works in that direction so if true, please, let it fly. Why would you do this?

Live Writer is arguably the best software product to come out of Microsoft in recent years. Much better than the crabby old Wordpress editor I have to use, streets ahead of ecto which has been in version 3 beta way too long and much nicer than MarsEdit. LiveWriter just works with all my favorite services like Flickr, video and all the cool stuff we want to put into our blogs.

I hear that 1.8 million people downloaded the Live Writer betas last year and yet Matt Mullenweg, a young fellow with whom I'm sure you can identify, says that Wordpress has had 5,880,790 downloads and Wordpress.com has 1.8 million registrants. That's a lot of people who have yet to enjoy the benefits of LiveWriter. As I go around conferences and geek gatherings, it seems to me that a lot of them are Mac fans. I'm one and I live in enterprisey land where very few people have Macs.

Given that Steve Jobs is doing rather well at the moment, but may have a few problems in the coming quarter, it would be a truly magnanimous gesture for a man of your stature and would bring joy to many people. Including the Microsoft middle managers who speak to me from time to time. They know the product is great but when we talk about this issue they become sad at what they believe is a missed opportunity.

LiveWriter is given away so it wouldn't cost Microsoft much in the scheme of things.

What say you? Will you do this one more thing?

Yours respectfully

Dennis Howlett