According to Slashdot:
In a major hiring coup, the MSN Search blog announced that Yahoo's head of Research and Development, Dr.Gary William Flake has now joined MSN. According to Oshoma Momoh, General Manager, MSN Search, Dr.Flake will be 'responsible for bridging the innovation happening between Microsoft Research and MSN and for setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and monetization engine.' Dr.Flake is also the first person to be directly hired as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, an elite group that has Dave Cutler and Anders Hejlsberg among other luminaries"
I'm getting that old feeling again. Like that first early morning when you can smell Spring in the air. Talk to Dean over on IE and you'll see how fired up he is. He loves new ideas - I gave him one and the team is investigating if they can make it happen (more on that later). MSN Messenger 7 has cool new features. MS Office Communicator is set to change the way I work and make me more productive. I went to multimon a few months ago, haven't had a single glitch and I can never go back too.
And the more I talk to folks on the Longhorn team, the old excitement about shipping great software is back. I can't talk about that...yet. :)
Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.