Agents in the Matrix and tough economic times

Before the movie "The Matrix," John Quarterman wrote an interesting book with the same title and around that same time Alan Kay published a great article about "software agents" that captured my imagination. Microsoft was interested in these ideas as well, and we brought some people and technology together into a suite of offerings that became http://agents.live.com/ (Windows Live Agents). While teaching in Microsoft's (awesome) Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View I met a talented, articulate, warm and friendly developer in this area who is now looking for a job. I believe there is a huge promise and potential to Alan Kay's vision that we in computer science have yet to realize. But the economics and business models apparantly don't work so we're stuck with less appealing software, sigh.