Really? According to "an unblinking eye on Microsoft" (ewwww, that title makes me uncomfortable) maybe: Former Microsoft NetDocs manager comes back to run search | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com .

I have a special place in my heart for Brian. I was one of the first external hires to NetDocs. I was at Intel and the Supercomputer Systems Division was in post-Cold War spin down mode. I had already had a couple of calls from Microsoft for positions that were not the right fit for me. Then BrianMac called.

At first, I was going to put Brian off but then he whopped me with the whammy of the NetDocs vision and I was beyond intrigued. So I interviewed, got hired, and learned a lot during those wild NetDocs years.

Brian's leadership was 180 degrees from the Dilbert Intel-culture I had come from. Brian spoke it like it was. I wasn't accustom to common sense or admission of stuff we were behind on and had to do a better job at. Usually that came up from people grumbling as they left a presentation, not from the presenter.

Early on, I felt like I let Brian down a bit because I didn't become a big hiring monster by getting my former Intel colleagues into Microsoft. It ended up that most of them loved living in the Portland area and happened to work for Intel, so moving to Redmond was something they had zero interest in.

I'm a Brian fan. And I know not everyone is. I think that if he's coming back that it's a good thing and that it will be very interesting to see what happens.

I'm beginning to look around for reliable and, well, free non-authenticated web services for doing financial analysis. Here's one that provides a free symbol lookup: WebserviceX.net Stock Quote.

(I got pretty addicted to the XML-based data that Amazon provides for helping to fill in the details on some of my media.)

And, it would appear, that it doesn't take much digging around the web to find service after service for stock quotes. E.g., SwanandMokashi.com - Our web services has another one, powered by Yahoo! financial data.

I think comes down to looking at this point at the various response messages and which has what needs to be tracked.