We who cover technology for a living often work under the assumption that the rest of the world - our audience - is as excited about technology as we are. Perhaps we don't spend enough time outside our heavily wired home offices. We see another half-gigabyte being heaped on top of a graphics card, or another way for us to plug to more monitors into our clusters of four, and we project another era of services disruption. Decisions about destinies await our readers, we conclude, and the measure of these technologies' value in their lives is coolness.

No PowerPoint slides, no cute skits, no fancy lighting. Just Ray and a decision that determines our very destiny.

Yet we try to write to what we believe to be the mainstream audience, paying heed to that first rule of public speaking. Well, please forgive my paraphrase, but I've been to the mainstream this week, and what I've seen is not yet the promised land. There were tens of thousands of people in that convention center this week, searching for the type of answer we haven't been giving in awhile. "My team supports sales," I recall one questioner asking during a TechEd session. "My company spent a lot of money sending our executives to a summit, only for them to come back with a mantra that says we should be closer to our customers. And everything I've seen here would put us further and further apart."

Microsoft deserves enormous credit for having the wisdom to assemble large conferences throughout the year worldwide, where its architects and its customers can exchange ideas, concepts, methodologies, and news from the field. A tremendous amount of information is exchanged there, nearly all of it priceless. Few corporations on the planet, and certainly no governments I know, are as receptive to input or as willing to expose its own ideas to public scrutiny.

Yet for a corporation that advertises itself as "people ready," you would think its leaders at the top would be as willing to communicate with those customers, to know its audience, as its people in the middle. If Microsoft or any organization is to effectively address these people in the mainstream we've just now discovered ourselves among, then there's something about them we need to understand: Coolness for them is measured by a different yardstick, having something to do with the ability to go home at the end of the day - a day which actually does have an end - to a warm and loving family, without the lingering guilt of having left undone so much of the work ahead of them.

So congratulations on your promotion, Mr. Ozzie, and thank you for stepping up to help run a company that may yet come to comprehend its customers. But please, on behalf of the mainstream, no more disruptions. Just start talking sense. We'll listen.