More yak on Microsoft's moves

No shortage of coverage of the product delays, organizational changes and software strategies. The knights of the news.com roundtable discuss the topic and David and I try to flush out meaning in our weekly podcast show. I also blogged about Microsoft shifting gear into the Live world.

Steve Gillmor provides his Gillmorian logic to what he calls the Allchin tax cut and peels back the onion on some industry insider/PR dynamics:

When I go on and on about Office being dead, and the Allchin Tax–which is about how [Windows head Jim] Allchin protected Windows at all cost by killing IE functionality that undermined Office revenue–and then Allchin retires while still ducking a real conversation with someone about its implications for the ascention of some of those technologies (AJAX, Live, advertising-based free, etc.) that he taxed, well...

Dion Hinchcliffe talks about the growing primacy of data over software in the context of Gates' messaging:

I've been studying the transcript of this week's public conversation between Bill Gates and Tim O'Reilly at MIX 06.  I was at the conversation and yet even at the time I couldn't help thinking that O'Reilly and Gates were talking past each other on several key points, particularly the increasing value of data and its potential as the primary source of lock-in and disruption in the future.  Looking at transcript now, it seems pretty clear that was the case; Gates seems to finds it important, but not central to the future.  And this difference of opinion, like the new lightweight development models, is fundamental to the discussion of the converging lines between the Web and the enterprise, something I (eponymously) like to call Enterprise Web 2.0.

And of course, much more yak to be had in the blogosphere...