THIS SPEECH BY BILL GATES on Longhorn, Microsoft’s in-design operating system, indicates that they’re thinking about blogs, at least a little:

But what’s interesting about this is a couple of things. First, it actually built in these common parts that show information, notification, services, that a user might really be interested in seeing when they’re working on their main application, without popping up a window that covers it. For example, the time or their buddy list or a slide show, which, of course, you can add and remove these tiles here — or even an RSS-feed built right into the sidebar. (Applause.) And you want to hear blogging or about to blog when they get — who is going to be the first person after the keynote to go and post on their blog. Scobel, OK. Well, we’ll see. It’s going to be a race. But the best part about this is not that we have this functionality built into Windows. The best part, like everything I’m going to show you today, is that this is part of the platform. This is part of the SDK that you guys are going to get, you guys can write to it, and we think you can do great, great things with this.

Make of it what you will.

[CORRECTION: It’s a Gates speech, but these comments are actually by Hillel Cooperman. I missed the transition as I was scrolling. Sorry]

UPDATE: This blog aims to get people to like Microsoft more, and talk about Longhorn. On the other hand, firing bloggers for blogging is probably a bad move, if the goal is acceptance in the blog community.