Earlier this year, I wrote a post about having lunch with Ray Ozzie, with no idea that I would end up the year one-upping that!

Today I was very fortunate to be among a group of 10 people to be invited to Microsoft for an event called "Mix n Mash 08". We spent the day seeing some of Microsoft's hottest up & coming (or still evolving) web-related technologies that will be drilled into further at MIX 08 in the spring - Silverlight, PopFly, Surface, FeedSync and, of interest to GoogleAnalytics fans, Microsoft AdCenter. While one might have thought the highlight was playing with the astonishing Surface computer for about an hour, the true hightlight was spending the last hour of the day with Bill Gates (yes, that Bill Gates).

This was an hour in which he talked to us for about 15 minutes about where he sees computing headed and then each of us asked him a question. And he didn' t just give glib answers. He spent about 5 or 10 minutes responding to each question and there were a few times when it seemed that he let himself just ...be himself. Had there been more time and more questions, I would love to also have asked him if he ever dreams of taking a day off from being Bill Gates. It was interesting, exciting and definitely fun. Especially fun when Jonathan Snook prodded him with a question about frequent comments that Microsoft is not innovating, but following and chose an unfortunate example (did Word follow WordPerfect?). But it was awesome because Bill got absolutely passionate in response to this.

The entire conversation will be provided to each of the attendees tomorrow along with the group photo.

Update here's the photo!

I have met a lot of players in our industry but this unquestionably takes the cake and I can proudly admit that I was excited and even a little nervous. I wanted to ask a question that was memorable, enaging and possibly even useful to him in some way. But really I just wanted to be a total fangirl. This is a man who has not only changed the world with Microsoft, but continues to do so in a more important way through the Gates Foundation thanks to the finances and power he has accrued over the years and with an opportunity to ask only one question, I wanted to try to acknowledge all of that in one swoop. I doubt I did. And I even forgot that I had a bottle of Maple Syrup in my backpack that I had brought for him.

Here's a list of the others who were at the meeting and I'm sure that we all came away with a different perspective, so it will be interesting to read everyone's take on this. What was most interesting to me was that we all come from different worlds. The only other .NET developer there that I knew was Rob Howard (who was there with a Mac and an iPhone, but then again, I have my blackberry). The rest were Flash developers, CSS folks, and others from non-Microsoft communities, so we all had a lot to share with each other.

I've also written more over on my other blog (www.thedatafarm.com/blog).

Kip Kniskern - www.liveside.net

Molly Holzschlag - www.molly.com

Jesse Warden - www.jessewarden.com

Jonathan Snook - www.snook.ca/jonathan

Keith Peters - www.bit-101.com

Kelly Goto - www.gotomobile.com

Erik Natzke - http://jot.eriknatzke.com

Julie Lerman - www.thedatafarm.com/blog

Rob Howard - http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward