Todd Bishop is a reporter on the Seattle Post Intelligencer who has a blog where he posts stories about Microsoft that didn't make it into the paper. In a recent post entitled, Microsoft eyes podcasts he writes

During the revival of the Gillmor Gang audio program over the weekend, podcasting pioneer Adam Curry said he had been trying for some time to persuade Microsoft and Apple to pay attention to the trend and build podcatching features inside Windows Media Player or the iTunes software. He said things changed when Steve Jobs demonstrated the new iTunes podcatching feature last week at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference. On the Gillmor Gang, Curry explained what happened next:

"It was like 15 minutes after it showed up in the Wall Street Journal when Microsoft called, saying, 'Hey, how do we get in this?' I don't know a lot about Microsoft. I do see they're a lot hungrier company than they used to be. But every single time you talk to them about anything that's new, or in this case iPodder functionality inside Windows Media Player, the almost standard answer is, 'Yeah we're going to have a lot of that in Longhorn.' That to me means there is this huge steamboat that is very difficult to steer left or right, and it's just harder to get stuff done at Microsoft."

That's just a snippet of an interesting discussion of the topic. You can download the full program via the Gillmor Gang link above.

I had lunch with someone from main campus yesterday and it seems that Adam Curry's perception is also being felt by the folks who work on the product teams. To repeat myself, I hope it doesn't take the stock hitting $10 before some action is taken.