Friday tends to be a good day for techinical talks at Microsoft. Today I went to two talks. The first was a dry run for a PDC talk “Visual Studio Whidbey: Advanced Debugging Techniques“. Some pretty neat stuff there. The second was the technical details to a smart solution to a networking problem I’ve been living with for a while. The fact that the feature won’t hit the world until Longhorn is sorta sad. It’s days like this that I wish Microsoft had a much tighter ship schedule for it’s operating systems.

This brings up a question for all three blog engine bots currently reading my site, What networking problems do you have that we can work on fixing?

Intresting points:

• MSN had it’s first profitable quarter, with advertising revenues up 50%.
• Biggest P&L group growth was Mobile and Embedded Device
• Microsoft has $51 billion in cash, Cash + Investments = $65 billion
• Unearned revenue is down to $8.2 billion, which is down more then what we expected. Some of that has to do with security. Security hits the bottom line (and hence the stock price).

Today the windows networking group had it’s quarterly meeting. Something in an email that I missed a month ago was the fact that appletalk inventor Gursharan Sidhu has joined networking as a Architect.

Joel points out that Amazon now searches the full text of books. It’s always really cool when a company suddenly blows your expectation of what they can do. “Everyone” does community, “everyone” does reviews, “everyone” does recommendations. Nobody does full text searching of the books they sell.