Who Microsoft invites to a "conversation"

The tagline for Microsoft's Mix '06 conference is a "72 Hour Conversation," reflecting the conventional wisdom that success on the Web increasingly relies on many voices and community, not just one company.

A random sampling of attendees shows that indeed Microsoft is reaching out beyond the armies of Windows developers you'd expect at a traditional Microsoft developer conference.

And showing how serious Microsoft is about appealing to Web designers, the company paid the way for some of the attendees to come. That led at least one paying customers to mock Microsoft billing of Mix '06 as "sold out."

Whether they're paying full freight or not, Microsoft is clearly reaching out beyond the walls of Redmond.

For example, Microsoft enticed an open-source developer who is an expert on the PHP scripting language to come to Mix. A session on Internet Explorer featured a developer who specializes in Safari on the Mac. A small group of well known bloggers, including Robert Scoble, were treated to a surprise lunch with Bill Gates.

It also held a "workshop" called Spark that brought a number of big thinker "architects" together with Microsoft architects to discuss how the consumer world of Web 2.0 and enterprise service-oriented architectures intersect. One of the ground rules was that they didn't discuss Microsoft products.