(Column) - Dateline: June 2005. Place: Gnomedex conference in Seattle, WA. Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team announces to the attendees of this year's conference that Microsoft's Vista is openly embracing RSS syndication technology.

On top of this, they also blew a few more minds with the news that they will be offering a RSS enhancement called Simple List Extensions, which were to be released under the Creative Commons license. From that point on, I honestly felt like Microsoft was working to get themselves back in touch with their user base. The audience cheered, life was good.

Dateline: June 2006. Place: Seattle, WA. Two Windows Vista fans hope to help distribute the beta OS on behalf of Microsoft. It should also be noted that one of the individuals who enabled the BitTorrent seed did so very publicly and made no effort to hide that fact. To those who were paying attention, it was clear that they were doing this to help out those who grew tired of waiting for the publicly released Vista beta download to be more readily accessible.

Alright, so now I am feeling a little confused. Obviously there is a large demand for Vista downloading options that actually work. People have openly expressed that they have no intention of waiting for the DVD and Microsoft has made zero effort to provide other options. What's the deal, guys? I can provide you with the contact details for a BitTorrent company that will allow you to maintain rock solid control over the distribution if this is a concern? Custom branded, DRM enabled clients, secure BitTorrent tracking with real time statistics - everything you would need to get the job done. Apparently Microsoft was not aware of this option or perhaps they're simply not interested? Either way, it's a shame.

Now I want to be totally fair about this. After all, who really wants a bunch of non-Microsoft authorized types running around all over the place distributing software in such a way that Microsoft cannot control the validity of the software being passed back and forth. Nevertheless, the desire and need for a valid BitTorrent option is needed. Microsoft, you have been presented with a clear opportunity to prove to the world that you are done with being perpetually late to the innovation game.

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