I just watched an interesting 10-minute interview (WMV) with Steve Ballmer on Channel 9. He touches on a few different subjects, including blogging, innovation and the XBox. Here’s a quote:
The PC is an important part of the overall ecosystem that people were using. It’s intelligence at the edge of the Internet…I think there are going to be two places for innovation for developers over the next two years. One’s going to be taking advantage of the intelligence of at the edge of the network–the PC, and other intelligent edge devices–mobile phones. And the other’s going to be using Web services and XML to glue things together, applications, services, across the Internet, inside a data center, inside a developer’s application. Between those two phenomenon, there’s plenty for developers to think about.
In discussing if anyone has out-innovated Microsoft, he fails to mention (and Robert fails to prompt him with) the obvious example–Apple. To his credit, he does recognize that Google has “done some interesting stuff”.
At the beginning of the interview, he mentions some “suggestions from my son on Halo 2 and Halo 3” somewhere off-camera on his whiteboard. Does this suggest that the rumours are true?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
What about people, aren’t we at the extreme edge of the network?
Brian.
I shoulda given him heck about Apple, but I didn’t want to get ratholed cause I had 10 minutes to get all my questions in.
Brian: I believe we’re off the network, somewhere out there in the ether.
Robert: Yeah, you used your ten minutes wisely, methinks.
And all this time I thought I was connected!
Brian.