Evan Williams recently met with Jim Allchin and wrote about in his blog post Dinner with Jim Allchin. Evan writes

One of Jim's repeated statements was that he wanted to bring "this stuff" to the masses. I asked for clarification because, in a lot of Microsoft's talk, they speak of RSS and blogging as the same thing. He agreed they weren't the same thing, and it seemed to be RSS he was talking about implementing in a variety of ways throughout Windows (e.g., built-in readers, automatic feed generation from a variety of lists...). While Microsoft does have a blogging tool, that's MSN—not Jim's department.

We discussed, briefly, how cool it would be if Windows had, say, the Atom API built in—and then that, it already would had the Atom API been built on WebDAV. Hmmm...I've heard that before.

It seemed pretty clear to me that it is not in Allchin's edict to create web services that bridge the gap between the desktop and the web—which, to me, seems like the future of computing (not to mention, the real potential power play against Google, et al). His job is to create another Windows. They will make more plumbing for others to plug in such services—and I assume it will be within MSN's edicts to do so. But they didn't do much (nor has anyone else) to take advantage even of the stuff that's in XP (such as Save to Web via WebDAV), to Allchin's dismay, it seemed.

I have seen a lot of interest across Microsoft for bringing RSS to the masses and all of us working on MSN Spaces definitely do want to bring blogging to everyone. There are definitely  cool things coming up in the next year or two.

As to whether MSN takes advantage of the various WebDAV related features of Windows XP? I suggest taking a look at the article on Publishing Web Site Content with Windows XP specifically at the section entitled Publishing to Remote Locations Using WebDAV. Not only do we support the WebDAV functionality in Windows XP in our properties such as MSN Groups but since there are so many Windows XP users out there, we don't dare change it without risking causing a negative user experience for a lot of people.

Guess who has to deal with the WebDAV legacy as part of his day job? :)