Todd Cochrane, of Geek News Central, says that Windows Media 11's lack of podcasting features will slow down podcasting's growth. I look at it a different way. I think that not having podcasting features will slow down Windows Media 11's growth. Translation, I agree with him that it sucks that WM11 doesn't have podcasting features yet.

Funny enough, I'm sitting in Podtech.net's headquarters, located on Sand Hill Road. I've spent the past few hours getting acquainted with their team and learning about their plans (they were funded for more than $5 million a few months back). The podcasting space is white hot and only going to get hotter and video blogging is coming onto the scene like a train of coal rolling into Livingston Montana. Anyone miss how big a deal Rocketboom has become in just a year?

Lesson for product planners in the tech industry: if you aren't supporting the latest stuff you'll be derided and left behind. If it takes 30 months to add a cool feature into your product you're too slow, not agile enough, and will see slow growth.

Hey, my fellow Microsofties. Want to see the stock go up? Cut the time from 30 months or longer to 12. The market will start to notice and you'll see increased buzz. That still won't be perfect, but it'll be a lot better than we got now.

There are still way too many Microsoft sites without RSS feeds (a shame, really, since Windows Vista's beta 2 is coming within hours, and it has a decent RSS aggregator built in). Fellow Microsofties, let's change that and we'll see good things come to us.

Instead we have folks like Todd saying we suck. I hate being told that.

Here's another challenge for our product planners. Are you planning OPML features yet? Second Life? Video blogging? Xbox Live integration? WPF-based overhauls? Microformats?