Why Microsoft needs RSS

VC Adventure: Why Microsoft needs RSS. (via Nick Bradbury)

"Enter the Internet age and people have discovered the power of
unstructured data. Google built an entire service around it in the form
of Gmail (lots of storage is great, but their real innovation was the
elimination of folders in favor of fast and easy search and what
essentially amounts to the ‘tagging’ of conversations). Both Google and
Microsoft recognize it in
their efforts in desktop search. And companies like del.icio.us and
social text really really get it in allowing us to control how we label
and categorize information. Perhaps I’m stretching some or perhaps
being a bit too hopeful, but I believe RSS can bring Office into the 21st
century. Imagine being able to tag a contact or a file with various
attributes that you can later quickly and easily search on. Imagine
being able to subscribe to a shared document folder to know when
someone in a workgroup updates a file (enabling shared folders to
function almost as a wiki). Imagine being able to stop placing files in
work folders altogether but rather tagging then with the pertinent
information which will enable you to much more easily find them later
(and remember what they were for). Great stuff – I hope MSFT is listening
"