Interesting comment from Chris Kinsman. The Mirra is overpriced, he says.

That's a common complaint from customers. They think they could do it cheaper. Probably so, but make it easy enough for a dentist who just wants to back up all his dental records in his office? Isn't that worth $400?

What I find interesting is that here, in less than an hour, we've gotten most of the objections to a new product out on the table.

We told the Mirra team "start a blog" so that they can answer these objections in their own words.

Has marketing changed? Have you ever been dragged into a Silicon Valley startup meeting before? Now you have.

It's very strange to experience just how the world has changed. I'm showing the Mirra folks comments from my blog's readers in live time. Dan Gillmor talks about how his readers are smarter than he is. Oh, I totally agree with that. My readers rock.

They are talking about the marketing challenges they are facing, and are reacting to what people are saying in my blog's comments. It's very surreal.

On the other side of this conversation are Bret Savage, Chief Client Architect; Gordon Clyne, Product Manager; Tung Pham, Product Manager; Sandy Benett, Vice President of Engineering; and Leslie Latham, VP of Product Management. And they are all reading your comments.

Joel Spolsky: "Dude you've been taking the scoble pill."

Heh. You should have been in the audience when Tim O'Reilly, at his recent foocamp, showed that Sharepoint book sales were growing very rapidly in sales.

Every year Tim does a talk on the state of the book industry. He shows that book sales very closely align with how much product is being sold.

So, if telling you that Sharepoint is hot makes me a corporate sellout, then so be it. Watch the trends, though. Even O'Reilly is seeing them. I'm seeing them too. I'm seeing Sharepoint adoption really taking off lately.

Ouch, sounds like Heather needs one of these Mirra boxes.

I'm here at Mirra getting a demo of their home backup servers. Unique way to backup your Windows machines. What is it? A low-cost box that you put on your network. Then from each of your Windows machines you get an application that automatically backs up all your stuff on each of your machines onto the Mirra box.

Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, took me here to meet the team. He swears by their service. Says that during the hurricanes that hit his house it backed up all of his stuff.

I'm getting one. Costs $399 for an 80GB server.

What's really cool is that I can get my stuff through the firewall. So, while I'm in Silicon Valley if I forgot something that I did on my home computers, I could log in, and get to it even though my home computers are behind a NAT and firewall. Really nice system.

By the way, thanks to Roland Dobbins, for inviting me to the Sunnyvale store to witness Halo mania up close and personal. He works at a large Silicon Valley networking company.

Text America is pulling Halo 2 images from around the world. Look at the "Editor's Choice" area. How did I know that? The editors there just awarded one of my pictures editor's choice. Nice to know there's some Halo 2 fans in the moblogging scene.

Feedster search for Halo. Blog about your Halo 2 experiences and watch the Feedster search query.

Mick Stanic says there were about 100 people waiting in line in Australia to buy Halo 2. They had better swag, though.

How about you? What was your purchasing experience like?

Larry Hryb, programming director for Xbox Live (aka Major Nelson), is giving real-time updates on his blog as to how well the Halo 2 network is handling the new load that is increasing exponentially every few minutes.

Michael Topoli waited in line for nearly six hours to be the first in Silicon Valley to buy a copy of Halo 2. At midnight hundreds of people lined up behind him. Here he is, holding his new copy of Halo 2.

It's appropriate that Michael picked up his copy at the Sunnyvale E&B Games store. That store is located on the old Olson Cherry Orchard where my family would come each summer to pick cherries when I was a kid.

What a scene. The store's manager said they expected to sell all of their copies in the first hour or so.

In line I met geeks from all over Silicon Valley. Some guys told me their friends were waiting in similar lines in Denver and Chicago.

Halo 2 is a phenomenon. I was blown away by how popular this game -- and Microsoft -- is. In Silicon Valley, no less. People were thanking me for making the game (I handed out Channel 9 guys to the first hundred or so people in line and wore my Microsoft badge).

Many people in line told me they took the next two days off of work just to play the game.