Rosh Hashanah to Michael Gartenberg and all my Jewish readers.

Microsoft exec picks up the trash, Lawrence Liu reports.

Meanwhile Maryam is typing away at her blog. She says she's not going to make me look bad, she's just going to make fun of me. Heheh.

She's actually a better writer than I am. She graduated with honors in English Lit from U.C. Berkeley.

Tour of the Computer History Museum, Part I is now up. Here's the details:

Gordon Bell. The name is legendary among geeks. Just read his Wikipedia page to see his accomplishments.

About 30 years ago he started collecting computers while working at DEC. That little hobby turned into a sizeable Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. We were honored to be able to get a tour from Gordon and John Toole, the executive director and CEO.

Also in the video are Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software, my son Patrick, and Dan'l Lewin, co-founder of NeXT Computer. Dan'l and Gordon now work at Microsoft.

Dan'l was on the original Macintosh team and tells us some stories about the early days.

Making an appearance was the Google Code Jam participants who were getting a tour of the museum at the same time we were walking around. You also get to meet Jesse, Dan'l son, who works at an Apple store in Palo Alto.

Oh, the Channel 9 Team is hiring. No, I'm not leaving to work for Google. Put that chair down Steve! ;-)

Hey, maybe Mini-Microsoft would want to work on our team? It's small. Agile. Geeky. And we have Jamie to reveal Mini-Microsoft's "true" identity!

Anyway, we're looking for some more loud mouths geeks who want to improve the world. I'll give the new hire my Firefox shirt. Heheh.

Oh, even though it's not review season anymore so brownnosing won't pay off for at least nine months, this team is a lot of fun and you'll get a good look at the new Xbox 360 if you worked here.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's COO: The Value in Volume (this was posted Saturday, and definitely teases us about what's coming tomorrow).

Some things here caught my attention.

"Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they'd rather give up - their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)"

Tim Bray, also at Sun, goes further: "Most ordinary database-backed business apps have migrated into the browser and they’re not coming back, no matter how great Windows Vista is."

I wonder what kind of business world Tim is hanging out in? It sure doesn't match the one I've seen. Heck, the London Train Station is still running on a character-mode app (modern way to say DOS).

And, you all should talk with Billy Hollis. He has story after story of businesses he's worked with who went to Web for things like call centers that came back. Why? Productivity. Turns out it's still more productive to use a well-designed application than something that fits into a Web browser.

But, watch the world jump on the hype. Even me. I'm a Web guy. I live on the Web. I love 37 Signals with the best of them. I think Tim O'Reilly's a swell guy. I still have the Google toolbar loaded (don't tell Ballmer, though, heheh).

But, we have one of the world's best done AJAX apps in the world (the Web version of Outlook). It's awesome. Everyone I show that to says "Microsoft did that? Wow!" Yet I wouldn't trade that for the real Outlook for anything. Why? Well, the real Outlook works offline. The real one is far easier to manipulate. The real one looks better. The real one doesn't go away if I accidentally hit refresh (or, worse, walk out of network range).

But, the world +is+ changing. There is a lot of change under foot here at Microsoft. This is the time when careers are made or lost. In a few minutes I'm gonna put up the tour of the Computer History Museum over on Channel 9 (it's a great tour). In there you'll see a bunch of names that were on top of the world 15 years ago. Will Microsoft be in a museum in 15 more years?

Sun and Google will definitely be writing our impending death again tomorrow. I'll let them have their fun believing they are bricking us over with their services strategy. It'll be a fun day.

Internet News: Next Up: Google Office.

Google and Sun are set to announce that tomorrow. Ahh, I expected to see this someday. Google's Chris Uhlik (who ran the Gmail and Toolbar teams) told me at Foocamp 2004 that Google was working on Calendaring (expected soon too).

Oh, Susan, yes, we certainly do live in interesting times!

Tomorrow should be an interesting news day. My money, by the way, is on the revamped Office 12. If you haven't seen that yet, here's the video.

I read Dave Winer to discover my wife is blogging. Yes, it's true. She is. And she's quite giddy about it, too. I remember that she used to say she'd never blog. Now she calls me and says "I have a comment!"

I've created a monster.

Nick Davis says he's done with Memeorandum and is going back to Newsmap. Says I like Memeorandum cause I appear on top of that page.

Well, yes, but that's only cause the rest of you haven't started participating in the conversation. Memeorandum is done automatically by analyzing linking and posting behavior. If you wanna be on top write a more interesting post. Hey, I bet this one has a chance of getting on Memeorandum.

Danny Sullivan, the guy who runs Search Engine Watch (THE site for those interested in search) answers back my search rant with a long response. He says we used to have pretty much what I asked last night for. Says he's 100 times more frustrated than I am with this stuff.

Danny Ayers: Semantic Web Starting Points.

Interesting list! Thanks for doing that Danny.

The Excel team is blogging. Ladies and Gentlemen, start up your spreadsheets!

It's funny, but MSN's engine was being tweaked over the weekend. Remember on Saturday when Channel 9 wasn't showing up in MSN? Well, today we're there. Eytan, an exec on the search team, tells me they were tweaking the engine over the weekend. I just tried a couple of other searches and it looks better now.

You can watch them increase the quality of their engine. Nearly every week I notice something has gotten better. This sure is an interesting space to watch.

Rick Segal, a VC, says: Web 2.0 != a check.

"Having said that, enough already with this Web 2.0 nonsense. We are doing the same thing we always do when "new" has "newer" come along. We hype the snot out of it and crap all over the 'old stuff'."