Long is “afraid of Microsoft fleeing back to the pre-Scoble stone-age.” The proximate cause is a list of suggestions for the next version of Windows, submitted by beta testers (I wasn’t invited). The next thing you know, a summary of the most popular suggestions, many of them impractical or unlikely or illegal, is being touted as the feature set for the next version of Windows. Which it isn’t. And the guy who posted the list on Microsoft’s Channel 9 forum gets chewed out publicly for doing “illegal stuff.”
I suppose it’s tempting here to do my best Homer Simpson Kent Brockman (D’oh!) impersonation and say, “I, for one, welcome our new Windows overlords.” But my take is simple: Talk’s cheap. The next version of Windows will be out in 2009-2010. A bunch of stuff in the current version needs to get fixed between now and then. If Sheriff Sinofsky can get his team to talk less and do more, that’s just fine with me.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I don’t think less talk is really a big issue, but don’t promise the end all be all operating system. Promise less, deliver more. Be realistic on what it’s going to provide etc. That’s probably asking to much though.
More tempting might be a Kent Brockman impression.
I think they took the feature set very seriously, and that there’s major overlap with their actual plans. But who knows.
I say MS needs less Channel9 and more Apple. Mystery and style instead of geeks and kernels.
Just so long as MS maintains a reasonable amount of dialogue between itself and its user base, I’ll be happy. Because really, when you operate on the scale that MS operates on, how can you afford NOT to?