There’s a minor dustup because it’s been reported that the Firefox team was invited to visit Microsoft up in Redmond. Lots of conspiracy theories.

But this demonstrates that the religious don’t understand how Microsoft works and why it got big.

I remember visiting with developers from all of Microsoft’s fiercest competitors at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Google. Oracle. Sun. Apple.

This isn’t the first trip that members of the Firefox team have made to Microsoft, either. I remember being in some top secret and high-level meetings that I wish I could tell you more about — but my NDA still holds.

Anyway, the reason Microsoft does this? Because by helping its competitors it helps itself. Think about this: if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?

And, for the Firefox team (or any team, really) they get some deep technical help from people who really understand Windows, plus they can go visit the developers who work on Windows and build relationships that are invaluable to understanding things.

Oh, and Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same, which makes our lives better.

The video camera in these photos gave away a little bit of what Thomas Hawk and I were doing. I was videoing him as he made photos. And, boy, was the night perfect for making a bunch of great images!

Hopefully my video comes out as well too. This will be part of PodTech’s new tech-oriented video show that’ll start sometime in September, not quite sure of the starting date yet.

You can see the originals here on Zooomr and he gives more details on the evening over on his blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love Dave Winer’s trend of turning sites into mobile phone friendly sites for me — a few minutes ago he turned on the New York Times. I’m not sure why I like this better than a full blown aggregator, but I do. I’ve been playing with this for a few days and it instantly became part of my reading behavior. When I was in the hospital room with Maryam’s mom I could just go to the New York Times and it came down fast and in a readable form.