A Light in the Darkness

Positive re-enforcement time: Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has a post
today titled href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/005453.html">MSN's Rising
Fortune that looks at MSN's recent accomplishments. A
snippet:

While the client division whacks away at Windows
security problems, href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/005411.html">chucks features
from Longhorn and readies the next-generation operating system's
delivery for not 2005 but 2006, MSN chugs out a barrage of new consumer
products. Just in the last few months, MSN has unleashed testing versions of
a music
store (now officially href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/003904.html">launched),
overhauled IM
client, href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/005229.html">blogging
service, href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/004549.html">Web search
service and now href="http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/005423.html">desktop search
utility. More MSN goodies are coming, but I can't discuss them right
now.

Being in the black and shipping successive
successful software product brings big kudos (and currency) to any
group. Is MSN running a renegade mentality? Have they overcome feature
fatigue? It will be interesting to see what happens to the V1 software. Does
it lend itself to V-next versions (where upon you run into the
increasingly common Microsoftie "coding is
hard" whining when it comes to modifying
fragile/buggy/hard-to-understand code)?

Or is this all throw-away
productlets soon to be replaced by other V1 software?

Enough success
for group XYZ and the other groups will eventually be preached to about
being more like XYZ. How would your group react and what does that say about
your group?