Microsoft doing it right …

These two great video (one and two) interviews with Scott Guthrie on IIS7 and ASP.NET show off Microsoft at its best, you might even go so far as saying a new Microsoft.  The IIS Team and the Indigo team seem to have learned some key lessons about standards compliance and compatibility (not always the same thing).  Of course it’s a key requirement of their market segment, and they don’t dominate it,  but its still nice to see the focus in these areas.  Two other things stand out for me in the interviews:

• The continued focus on making IIS a great platform upon which people can build additional infrastructure richness and of course great applications. This is achieved by modularising the platform and documenting the APIs of the standard modules and allowing new modules to be easily created.
• The second is that with IIS a raft of the most common open source applications are going to be provided, and integrated,  from forums to blogs, another really great move.

I just wish they had given him advanced notice of  the key question, “how do you differentiate yourself against apache” (which he didn’t really know how to answer) and asked him a follow up question of “how you differentiate against PHP and JSP” (which was probably the most important question).  That said I think this stuff is going to demo pretty impressively to developers!