shahine.com/omar/

I'm a longtime observer of MSFT. I have friends that work there and follow the company closely, but I should note I'm an Apple user through and through. For years I thought MSFT was just rotten and unfixable. Too big, too slow, too bureaucratic, standards unfriendly, etc to ever be anything but a utility to the average consumer. And indeed that's how many look at MS, like the phone company or the electric company, an unavoidable evil. But I'll admit that several recent developments have chipped away at my long-standing biases. 1) The next version of Office seems amazing and the team members who blog about it really seem to get it. 2) The MS embrace of RSS is heartening and 3) throughout the company there seem to be smart people saying the right thing. This said, Vista is at least from the outside a bit of a train wreck, as is the security situation, as is even IE 7. Your biggest liability Steve Ballmer. He seems to embody the old bad MS. Marketing is a mess as well. What would I like to see- a clean sweep of the marketing dept, the Vista team cut down to a few key players who get it and who deliver (small teams always seem to outperform big ones), and a sharp focus on making IE 7 the most standards friendly & speedy browser on the market. These things would really give MS the kick in the butt it needs... in the meantime I've been buying MSFT stock for the first time in my life (AAPL paid for my house) because I think it's a value stock. Who knows if things go right it could even pay for that summer home I've always wanted.