• Windows 7. Put on the spot, Foley was asked to give her best guess as to when Microsoft would release the next version of the Windows operating system. Surprisingly, she anticipated a delivery date of 2009—muchearlier than anyone expects. She professed confidence in Steven Sinofsky, who was responsible for several versions of Microsoft Office and is now overseeing Windows development.
• Google. Foley said that Google is not Microsoft’s largest competitor, and noted that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer always cites IBM as the company’s most important competition. In Foley’s words, Google is a “one-trick pony” that does extremely well in the growing online-advertising market, but hasn’t proven itself in other highly touted areas, such as desktop productivity applications.
• Yahoo. In light of her low opinion of Google, it wasn’t surprising to hear that Foley thought a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo was nonessential and even a bad idea. She thought Google fever had clouded the judgment of Microsoft leadership.
• Partners. Having recently come back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Foley noted that many partners were upset about growing hosting ambitions at Microsoft, including the extension of hosted Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to smaller companies. She explained that Microsoft had no choice but to offer more sophisticated application-hosting services to all customers, not just enterprise businesses. Microsoft and its partners need to adjust to the changing dynamics of the business software market, she said.
• Blogging. As part of her reporting, Foley subscribes to every MSDN blog—there are more than 6,000—and scans the RSS feeds from those blogs each morning. She also reads several other blogs about Microsoft, including Long Zheng’s I Started Something and Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
• Mini-Microsoft. Foley recruited arguably the most infamous Microsoft blogger, Mini-Microsoft, to write the foreword for her new book. She humorously told about her cloak-and-dagger meeting with Mini, who is famous for protecting his or her identity and used a disposable cell phone to communicate with Foley. When she arrived at the designated meeting location, Mini-Microsoft called and asked her to move to another location. Given the small size of the audience, people wondered whether Mini was in the room.

The book signing provided great insight into one of the people who has significant sway over the public perception of Microsoft, whether or not that is her intent. She is humble, but takes her role as an independent and widely informed observer seriously. As a regular reader of her blog, I came away with a greater personal respect and appreciation of her work.