Jon Udell is leaving InfoWorld and joining Microsoft. He will join the same group (Channel 9) where Robert Scoble worked. I met Jon 5 years ago when I was at Groove Networks and Jon was writing for InfoWorld. Jon not only writes about technology, he is a very skilled software technologist.

Scoble says about Jon "Wow. I think it’s funny that Jon asked himself whether he’d be Microsoft’s new “Scoble.” Hell, I was trying to be as good as Jon Udell was (and I came up short — he’s a coder that can explain how to program to other people, and has far more influence among developers than I’ll ever hope to have).

And here is what Jon had to say about Scoble: "Robert played a key role in a grand experiment to make Microsoft's development processes more transparent. Channels 9 and 10, and the hundreds of Microsoft blogs throughout the organization, are evidence that the experiment is succeeding.

I've proposed a different experiment. I'll continue to be a channel for alpha geeks. But I also want to become a channel for a whole lot of civilians in the mainstream. And above all, I want to build bridges between these two groups."

James Governor says "Holy crap, Microsoft just got awesonme. Jon and JJ (Allaire) and Ray (Ozzie) - are the soul of a new Microsoft."

Most people in the software development community know Jon Udell. He is a superstar writer and technologist. He has a different writing style than Scoble, no one can replace Scoble. However, Jon is a software coder who not only writes about it, he codes it, tests it, and digs down into feature/function comparisons better than anyone I know. Microsoft scored big getting Jon on the team! Congratulations to Jeff Sandquist for hiring Jon.