Congrats to Robert Scoble on his new gig, and no disrespect intended to great MS bloggers like Dare Obasanjo and Niall Kennedy, but for my blogging dollar, the best blog ever published by a Microsoftie is Jensen Harris' Office UI blog. I'm not the first to note it, but I wanted to chime in with my vote there. Honorable mention goes to Ray Ozzie, who's infrequent, but then some of the very best bloggers are.
It helps that Jensen's working on Office 2007. (If they paid me, I might call it The 2007 Microsoft Office System, but they don't. Speaking of branding nazis, there's only one "e" in "Movable".) Office 2007 is the single most impressive and ballsy effort that Microsoft's put into anything since Word 6, which I think was the best desktop software application ever created.
I'll hopefully expand on these thoughts more when I've got a few minutes, but I wanted to throw that out there while I'm thinking of it. Commence flames... now!
(More evidence of Jensen's greatness: The phrase "Install the Send a Smile tool" appears in a post. Really, shouldn't we all install the "Send a Smile tool"?)
+1
Word 6 for Mac (I am assuming you were talking the Windows version) was one of the worst software releases ever.
My favorite Microsoft blogger is Raymond Chen.
Willie, I do agree that trying to use a "universal" Word runtime on the Mac was ill-advised, but the blowback on that decision helped to justify the MacBU, so at least some good came out of it. :)
*crickets chirping*
So much for the flames, I guess.
I'd have to cast another vote for Raymond Chen, but Harris' blog is a very close second.
what can be my favorite Microsoft blogger?
Word 6? It was slightly more functional that Wordpad. Word 7/Word 97 was the best software Microsoft ever created, bar none, and WordPerfect 7 was even better than Word 7/Word 97. (WP has gone downhill quickly since then. Even the longtime WP users I know are starting to switch.)
I agree, Jensen's knack for using appropriate graphics to drive home points is amazing. I vividly recall his use of the tiny slide show button in Powerpoint to talk about how stage fear may interfere with the use of presentation applications.
If you haven't checked it out yet, you should see the video of his talk at BayCHI.