There's a conspiracy going on here.  We all ignored the first signs ofit, but now it's too apparent to ignore.   Microsoft is engaging insome devious master plan that will affect most of us.

We all read with shock and awe, Scott Hanselman's post where he announced he was becoming a blue badge.  People wondered what this would do to his blog content, or his contribution to DasBlog.  This was the first sign.  And we did NOTHING.

Today, I saw the 2nd sign, and I'm going to expose this Microsoft conspiracy for what it is.  Phil Haack just announced that he is joining the ranks as a Microsoft employee.  That's right, you heard me. 

Microsoft has hired the technical and charismatic leaders of the two most popular open source blogging platforms for .NET. This is all a part of a master plan to squash the multi-billion dollarmarket so that Microsoft alone can swim in the sea of money that is tobe made from .NET open source blogging.  Don't kid yourself, there is buku (TM) money to be made in this area.

Sure,both Phil and Scott claim to stay committed to SubText and DasBlog,respectively.  But we all know better.  Soon they will be hard at work,developing the most incredible blogging platform ever devised.  I even have a name for this stealth-assassin project.  It will likely be called Microsoft Collaborative Team Works For Online Weblogs Framework Foundation System 2008.  I can just hear Microsoft Marketing salivating at that title.

Allkidding aside, I think that Microsoft is going to be changing it'simage, especially in the ASP.NET arena.  They've snatched up some key individuals in the community and they will definitely be making waves.  You can quote me on that.