Welcome to our first post on a new blog from Microsoft—the Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short. E7 is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog.

Beginning with this post together we are going to start looking forward towards the "Windows 7" project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what's in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista's broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product.

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we're opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment values the three-year-old Facebook, which will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.

The deal ends two months of jockeying between three major Internet players for the right to invest in and forge close ties with Facebook.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will sell the banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the United States, splitting the revenue with it. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to run banner ads on the site in the United States through 2011.

The astronomical valuation for Facebook is evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been trying to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly.

Welcome to a new blog from Microsoft. The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com. Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them. They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security. Of course, there is controversy even in the word "hacker" but I don't think that should stop us from using it in the manner I think is the most appropriate. At his or her core, a true hacker is someone who is curious and wants to learn how systems work. This can and of course at Microsoft is done in an ethical, legal manner. We employ "white hat hackers" who spend their time pentesting and code reviewing applications and software looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that others don't once we've released that code into the wild. We employ many many smart testers who know more about some of our software then perhaps the architects who designed it. We also employ some of the top researchers in their industry, dedicated people working on the bleeding edge of whats going to be common place in the next 5 or 10 years of computing. So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do.

At a "global summit" of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would "win" in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy.

"The words are empty," Scoble responded. "Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that's 'in it to win', then I don't get it."

He continued: "Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

"Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative."

Scoble's comments reflect wider concerns - shared by some Microsoft insiders - that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer - Rick Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of Sydney computing company Topologi, based in Pyrmont - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an "open document format" and a rival put forward by Microsoft.

Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.

In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing "what I asked Rick to do".

"Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections," reads the email Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.

"Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."

The email also encouraged Jelliffe to disclose his deal with Microsoft in his blog at oreillynet.com, and reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any of his Wikipedia edits before they were made.

Welcome to the new and improved Windows Vista blog. A few months back, I pushed our team to bring the blog from the blogging Dark Ages into something a little more modern. The blog back then wasn't quite doing the job. Postings were infrequent, and the site wasn't particularly helpful.

In May, the team really turned the corner and today we're launching the newly updated look and feel. I hope you'll agree it's a big improvement. It incorporates some key parts of the Windows Vista visuals. We've also improved the organization of the site, so things should be easier to find. The team's providing great information, and I'm happy to see the comments and feedback from the community through the comments on the site. I read these regularly, as do many others in the Windows leadership team, so please keep the feedback coming.

One of the exciting new features we're inaugurating today is the ability to deliver new kinds of content to you. The blog can now support cool multimedia content, including better image handling and video clips. The team will film short videos around our hallways and then make them available. I hope this helps the community connect with the experience of living and breathing the development process of Windows Vista.

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Yep, this is my new gig. No more Microsoft-Watch for this Microsoft watcher. I decided it was time to move to a place that reflects my opinion that blogging is the future of journalism. If you want to read more about my decision to join the blogging ranks at ZDNet, check out my short but sweet "Exit Interview" over on Robert McLaws' LonghornBlogs.com Web site.

On this new site, I will weigh in on Microsoft news of interest to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Expect to read about everything from Windows Vista and Office 2007, to Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft "Live."

Robert Scoble says it wasn't a defection. We all know the code words: "left to pursue other opportunities." But in the truest sense of those words, Robert says he leaves Microsoft because his work there was done and he comes to PodTech to participate in a nascent industry that promises to go nova.

This number includes blog readers who applied through JobsBlog and were later hired ... Their JobsBlog application is not necessarily the reason they were hired. (The successful attempt could have been, again, a Monster.com posting, a friend who is an employee, a cold call from a recruiter, etc.) It also only includes people who applied through the blog, so if you read and loved the blog and got hired - but didn't apply through us, you wouldn't be included in this total.

What I do know is this ... Each of these 137 did, at some point in their candidate lifecycle, apply through the blog, and therefore, we can assume they also read our posts and utilized our tips!

Aside from e-mail, RSS also plays a major role in Windows Live Mail Desktop. The software can serve as a complete RSS reader, enabling users to organize subscriptions using folders, instantly see unread items, and view items in a built-in preview pane.

Users can also click on an RSS item and immediately blog about it using the new "Blog It!" feature.

"Blogging and RSS looks like they're here to stay and phishing is more dangerous than ever. Now is the time to add life back into my favorite free email client and we're injecting a large dose of adrenaline to kick things back up," says Live Mail Desktop developer Lei Gong.

Other improvements being added to the client according to Gong include a redesigned user interface, emoticon and inline spell checking, and automatic syncing with Hotmail contacts.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site because it received a legally binding notice that the material violates local laws. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable.

Microsoft has said that it 'will remove access to blog content only when it receives a legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws, or if the content violates MSN's terms of use'.

The Chinese agencies will have to first find offending content, and then send Microsoft a separate letter for each instance it finds, putting the onus, and the overhead for content blocking, on Chinese officials.

If the Chinese agencies decide that, in doing this, Microsoft is failing to adequately block the content it doesn't want available it could shut Microsoft's MSN Spaces blog service down.

Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitz right now is on stage at Gnomedex. He basically announced widespread support for RSS in Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7.0. This includes: 1) improving basic RSS experiences for users, 2) RSS tools that empower developers to RSS-enable applications, and 3) adding new extensions to RSS that broaden it (all available via Creative Commons). I was pre-briefed earlier this week, however, Scoble just told me there's a full video demo posted on Channel9.