Thomas Hawk posted some excellent comments to a recent post here and then turned those comments into a post on his own blog. He’s absolutely, 100% right. Digital photography is a killer feature that is getting people excited about PCs again. Managing photos, digitally manipulating them, turning them into slide shows, printing… These are activities that people of all ages and all levels of computer expertise can relate to. Thomas has a great suggestion for Microsoft:
Yahoo! got Flickr on the cheap. Microsoft should be developing something like this right now in order to compete in the future. They also have a natural tie in with Media Center. If Microsoft tied in an online photo sharing service with my picture slide shows you would have instant built in content on a PC. These powerful slide shows would add to the wow factor of the product.
Right! Most people think of Media Center and they think of its TiVo-like features. But the ability to play digital music, tune in Internet radio stations, listen to podcasts, and make easy slide shows out of digital photos are equally important. When I show off my Media Center setup for friends, photo slide shows always get the biggest wow. If you just got back from vacation, do you really want to drag everyone into the den to see the photos from your trip? Wouldn’t you rather show them off in the living room on your big-screen TV?
Microsoft, are you listening?
(Oh, and be sure to follow the links in Thomas’s post, especially this collection of top-rated photos at Flickr. His photography is technically first-rate, and he also has an artist’s eye for composing and framing shots. I wish I had his talent!)
Ed Bott 
OT, but you might be interested.
Project Aardvark, Joel Spolsky’s much hyped ‘Apprentice for software developers’, has been outed and revealed to be http://www.sidepilot.com, a VNC for dummies.
Lots of discussion about it at http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel
MSN Spaces has rockin’ photo slideshows if I say so myself. So who knows what the future holds 🙂