But even without the flagship experience, one thing was obvious: Microsoft eats its own dog food. I know this because they kept repeating it to me like some pre-Kool-Aid mantra. From the PR folks to the IT managers down to the IT workers, everyone said it: "We eat our own dog food." I was going to make the gourmet Alpo crack, but I managed to hold my tongue.

Meantime, the tour showed pretty much beyond a reasonable doubt that Microsoft does run its 20,000-plus node, international network on 99 percent Windows technology, including servers, workstations, and edge security. (I'm hedging on that last 1 percent in case some starved whistle-blower covered in torture welts stumbles out of Redmond next week clutching a 1U running Debian.)

It's the edge security bit that was the focus of Microsoft IT's announcement about this past Saturday. As Santa was hitching up his sleigh, Redmond posted a document discussing how Microsoft IT has made significant remote access security improvements using new Microsoft technology. Or should I say "technologies"? Because once you're all up in that doc, the sheer amount of new product CDs being thrown around could have decorated my tree.

This latest generation of Microsoft security products -- all of which was required to make the remote access improvements -- goes like this: Windows Server 2003, Internet Authentication Service, Internet Security Accelerator 2004, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, SQL Server 2000, Public Key Infrastructure & Certificate Services, and Connection Manager. Hey, if Santa got into Bill's chimney, that much stuff should have alerted U.S. Homeland Security.

But we're still not done: All those changes required as an underlying platform to deploy a final piece, called SRU (Secure Remote User), which is what Microsoft's security doc is really about. Redmond's IT department says SRU allows it to control specific remote desktops and their configurations. This, in turn, lets it be absolutely certain of every remote desktop's kosherness, and that in turn means a reduced threat of external malware attacks.