Robert Scoble proved to be a resourceful and persistent blogger in the quest for capturing the essence of his company's CEO (Steve Ballmer).  The video is available on MSDN Channel 9 (video forum), and it comes with a complete transcript as well.  In particular, I loved Steve's answer about blogging:

Q: Microsoft has been a leader in transparency, blogging, and Channel 9. Why did you allow blogging to happen?

A: In the world of developers I don’t think it would have mattered if I wanted to allow blogging to happen or not. But I think it’s been a great way for us to communicate to our customers and for our customers, more importantly, to communicate with us. We trust our people to represent our company. That’s what they are paid to do. If they don’t want to be here they wouldn’t be here. So in a sense you don’t run any more risk letting someone express themselves on a blog than you do letting them go out and see a customer on their own anyway. It just touches more people. Hey, if people need to be trained or understand better we can do that but I find that it’s just a great way to have customer communications.

During Supercomm, I took a closer look at the IBM Blade Center.  The IBM booth happened to have some IMS demos, and one in particular caught my eye: a gaming app running on some PDAs (I have a blown up photo in my photo archive).  I thought this was very interesting, as it gave a little snippet of the future of IMS, where partnering is key.  IBM has developed a big ecosystem of vendors to support its IMS offerings.  The IT folks are beginning to take over the telco world (slowly but surely).  So IBM (for that gaming demo) was relying upon the Audio Codes MGW, the Brooktrout MRF, the Nextone CSCF, the Terraplay gaming app, the Ubiquity SIP Application Server and the Leapstone SCIM. 

So what is from IBM besides the Blade Center blade/chassis shown above?  The Presence Server and the IBM Global Services organization that puts together the entire solution.  That last item goes a long way into making this best-of-breed concept a viable option.