By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

RSS guru Niall Kennedy announced yesterday that he's leaving Microsoft out of frustration with lack of support for his syndication work at Microsoft Live. His mission was to build a massive syndication platform for all of Microsoft's users.

"The opportunity presented to me was extremely unique and a way to change how the world interacts with syndication technologies such as RSS, RDF, and Atom. The launch of Windows Live and Ray Ozzie's vision of Internet services disruption made me believe Microsoft was serious about the space ..."

But, he says, if Ozzie and MS that opportunity is simply stuck behind Redmond's need to get Vista out the door.

What do you do when the market responds to your 6 month-old online services strategy by reducing your valuation by 1.5 Yahoos? Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well.

It's a blogosphere story, for sure, and not one you'll see in the Business page at the Seattle P-I, but Microsoft bloggers are smelling blood in the water.

AccMan Pro: "My sense is the accountants are back in charge of running the farm. This is very bad news because they’ve clearly got a bunch of stock analyst brown nosers rather than number savvy innovators. Of course Microsoft has a duty to its shareholders. But in a world where innovation is currently dominated by the small, often independent vendors, the big boys need a new game plan. That has to include putting innovation on the front burner, not extinguish it altogether."

Anonymous MS insider Mini-Microsoft: "A compelling vision would be great right about now. And not a dorky wired-up clipboard that has seemed to have dematerialized. A vision around making money and doing things that, if I told people sucking on a Frappuccino about, they'd say, "Oooh, that's cool. When can I do that?" And if someone is talented and motivated to get things done, how do you unblock them to make it so?

Regarding Niall's comment that it's easier to get VC money for a new startup that get funded inside Microsoft, Joshua Jaffe: "The danger that the increased flow of venture capital money presents to large companies isn't just the increased likelihood that one of these newly funded startups will eventually dent those companies' businesses. An added danger is that the venture capital money is luring some of those large companies' brightest minds away with the promise of startup success. That migration actually increases the likelihood that the small companies can eventually impact the larger companies' businesses."

Contact Koman at rkoman/at/gmail/dot/com.