üInsider Blogging looks at the employees blogs of our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."

Bill Gates gave a keynote address at the Microsoft WinHEC today, and boy are the Microsoft Kool-Aid drinkers buzzing over it! David at the Windows Server Division Weblog is "gushing" over the newly-unveiled Beta 2 release of the Longhorn Server Manager. He says, "Each role has been redesigned to expose greater granularity in how the role services can be installed and configured," and, it turns out, even the outsiders at PC Magazine ("Microsoft makes a valiant effort to simplify the life of the busy administrator in a smaller shop-and almost succeeds") and eWeek ("we were impressed by the way that Microsoft's forthcoming refresh has progressed, inside and out") are pretty jazzed.

When it comes to security on Microsoft's internal systems, however, the message seems to be a bit less effusive. Microsoft is considering taking away admin rights from its employees, basically keeping them from installing whatever software they wish (and closing the door on the vast majority of viruses and other security risks). Dana Epp tells Microsoft to "Eat your own UAC dogfood already!" (UAC stands for User Access Control, the Vista feature that would be altered to remove employees' administrative rights) and über-insider Robert Scoble agrees: "It's time to step up and do this, no matter how painful it is."

Scoble points us to a list of reasons why to consider Microsoft for Web 2.0 development, on Web 2.0 Central. The writer admits he is drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid and tells us that Scoble is reason #8 (others include #1, Free Developer Tools, and #3, Microsoft Atlas makes AJAX easier). Matt Griffith gives the other side of the coin, disagreeing with each of the 13 reasons; even Robert Scoble is a negative to him ("the recent openness of Microsoft is a double-edged sword ... these guys and gals are smart ... Yet Microsoft as a company still makes decisions that only serve their self interest").