#6 Phil, I think they're talking about people like Doc Searls. There's a large and thriving tech-centered blogging community, just as there's a large and thriving blogging community made up of people who write about things I'm not the least interested in. I occasionally read Doc and a few others.
I've got no grump with Micro$oft. As far as I know, this is the only blog that's actually Micro$oftish. It runs under IIS, using ASP, except when I get mad and try to rewrite everything in PHP running on Apache. The database started out as Microsoft Access, and did a good job until it reached about 30,000 articles. If I'd written a single line of code a bit differently, we might still be using it. It's a good product.
Not that I worship at the altar. We don't use SQL Server because we got timeout errors under load that we don't get with MySQL -- which is also free, unlike SQL Server. I find ASP and PHP to be pretty comparable, and I can actually run PHP under IIS, while I can't run ASP under Apache, at least not without laying out still more money.
I don't think Micro$oft will become a player in the blogging world because it costs more to run it than it does to run Linux and Apache. I had to lay out money for both hardware and software, whereas if I'd started on Linux/PHP, I'd just have had to pay for the hardware. I suppose they can offer an ASP-based service something like Blogspot. Hell, I could write it for them, and they've got people who can write better code than I do. But it's pretty hard to make any money competing with a free service. |