John Wulff says he feels bullied by me. "Just as your post was starting to get me excited about what Microsoft has coming, you slap me in the face. Sure, many of us have thought from time to time that Microsoft's reign is on the decline, but it is not the place of an evangelist to say, "I told you so.""

Sorry, I'm human and I make mistakes. I take a LOT of abuse on behalf of Microsoft every day and sometimes I slap back. It's not good behavior and I'll work on fixing that.

Russell Beattie pulls the standard old blog trick. Tells the world that he's thinking of switching away from his Mac and back to Windows. That always generates lots of traffic and gets lots of links. Me? I can't buy this kind of publicity. Thanks to Vinit Carpenter for letting me know.

Sean Alexander: "the "shock and awe" of products as Scoble describes it is just starting."

Wow, just had a great tour around the computer history museum. Gordon Bell, the guy who started the museum, gave us a three-hour tour. Also here was Dan'l Lewin, who was one of the first members of the Macintosh team at Apple (and then went on to cofound NeXT with Steve Jobs and now is an executive at Microsoft). Dave Winer, you all know him. Ajay Juneja, founder of Speak with Me (new company that you'll hear more about in the next two years and he's a greeter here at the museum). From the museum was John Toole, CEO, Dag Spicer, Senior Curator, Steven Brewster, Director, and others. Andre Vanier, founder of a new free 411 company that you'll hear about in about a month, was here too. And my son and Dan'l's son who works at the Palo Alto Apple store. Very eclectic group. This was a once-in-a-lifetime interview. Wow.

I'll try to get the videos up later next week. These are great ones.

I'm off, we're getting a tour of the Computer History Museum for Channel 9. Some famous geeks are showing up I hear. We'll be there at about 11:30.

Hmmm, I'm hearing all about a big Palm/Verizon/Windows Mobile announcement on Monday.

Dave Winer says that Microsoft isn't trying to compete with Google's Gmail or Yahoo's new (and awesome) email system. Um, Dave, that's not true. You might want to watch this video about the new Hotmail that's under development or this one about the new Outlook Express, now called Windows Mail, that's also under development.

I keep hearing this question: Does Vista matter? Preston Gralla, over on O'Reilly blogs, is the latest to ask.

OK, let's assume that Preston is right. Let's assume that Google has a rich Internet OS that comes out in the next year. Let's say it does everything you want to do. Email, blogs, calendaring, gaming, mapping, searching, and all that stuff. Assume they have 100 components like Gmail that do various things.

Oh, and assume that we are not gonna work on any of these services ourselves (that's an assumption that's already been proven false -- have you missed the videos I've run in the past two weeks about the new Hotmail, start.com, Virtual Earth, and other services we're working on?)

I think such a view of the world assumes we don't do anything better than XP. That's clearly not gonna be true. Such a Web-oriented world will look better on Windows Vista due to AERO. It'll perform better due to the new networking stack and new work in kernel. It'll sound better due to the new audio stack. It'll be more reliable due to the new driver stack. Don't believe me, that's ATI saying that. It'll have better video due to the new compositing engine. And there's a bunch of other things to come. And we haven't really started talking about the applications that'll come on it that'll compete with the Web-based components. The new Windows Mail, for instance, still has a better offline story than even Yahoo's new email system (which is nicer than Google's, by the way).

So, go ahead. Tell me that Windows Vista isn't gonna matter in a Web services based world. I sure don't believe that.

Oh, and just in case you do believe that, wait until you see the video I'm doing next week with the Windows Gadgets team.

The unauthorized Microsoft weblog asks whether Mini-Microsoft drank too much of the Microsoft Company Meeting Koolaid. Heheh. A few guys gave me heck for being too exuberant yesterday. I actually toned myself way way down because I thought Mini-Microsoft would blast me for being too exuberant. But now Mini-Microsoft understands what I was talking about Shock and Awe. Everyone is counting Microsoft out. Big mistake.

Oh, one other thing that was missed was Ray Ozzie coming on stage with Bill Gates. Ray is the man. He's clearly being given a test for the next year or two. You think the Apprentice shows are fun? Oh, man, this is going to be far more fun to watch. It's called "Ray, are you good enough to take Jim Allchin's job?"

All Ray has to do? Change Microsoft from being a client software company to one that gets the Web. Really this time. It's no accident that MSN and Windows are together in one group now.

Well, Ray, we got Microsoft to get RSS. Now let's go the next step. It's gonna be a fun year or two to watch.

Oh, as to whether Mini drank too much Kool Aid? I don't think so. Shock and awe continues.

So, was just checking in on MSNBC. They have a nice package of news about Hurricane Rita. The Houston Chronicle has the Stormwatchers blog -- citizen journalists covering Hurricane Rita.

Renee Blodgett is raving to me about 1-800-FREE-411 after she saw that at Demo. That lets people get around the 411 charges that most cell phone companies hit you with. That's cool. But how are these guys gonna make money? I don't know that part.

Bob Lutz of GM is now podcasting. This is a great way for a company to get the word out to its best customers and influentials.

I gotta visit Chris Pratley with my video camera. The new OneNote 12 rocks. Chris gives a little taste over on his blog and Owen Braun has more on his blog.

Goowy brings a bunch of Web-based services and gives them a Flash-based front end. I played with it a bit. It's a lot of fun to play with.

Looking for a news aggregator for Outlook? Well, there's always the NewsGator that I use. But Attensa has an interesting new version out too that now supports Del.icio.us.

When I was flying on Southwest yesterday I read their in-flight magazine and there was an article about Tom Wiles who drives a truck around the USA and blogs and podcasts his journey.

Twenty years ago we'd never have known about a guy who drives a truck. Welcome to the long tail. Er, the long road. Or something. Thanks Tom for using Windows!