Microsoft now is getting wifi-enabled busses to carry around its workers.

Heheh. Google had that, what, two years ago? So does Yahoo.

I wonder when Microsoft is going to get free meals for its workers?

That said, Microsoft brought out a new beta of Windows Live Writer, a good offline blog editing tool. Does Google have one of those? Very nice.

I am still thinking a lot about David Boschmans lately. He was our gracious host in Belgium when we visited in December of 2005. Spent a lot of time driving Maryam and me around and hosting dinners and having us speak at Microsoft and other places. Proudly talked about his new family (he has a two-year-old daughter, he was so proud of her). Shared more than one beer with us and was clearly liked and trusted by lots of geeks in Belgium. Here’s a picture of me with David.

Two weeks ago he died unexpectedly in his sleep. He was 32.

His death hit me and Maryam hard. Harder than other tragedies in the tech world have hit me lately.

It gets down to who is a “real friend” and who is an “online friend.” David was an online friend who turned real over beers in Brussels.

He also reminded me that every day is a gift. I’ve had 10 more years of those gifts than he’s had. He did a lot in his short time here.

I look around the Web and see the love for David from around the world. Tom Raftery, Ireland’s top tech blogger, wrote about him. Roy Osherove, one of my favorite bloggers in Israel, did a video for him.

If you search Google for his name you’ll see page after page of people who were touched by David. Nathan Weinberg links to lots of the best stuff about David.

Anyway, what are you doing with today? That’s what David keeps asking me.

Today I’m thinking about a guy who took a few days out of his life to make sure we had a good time in a foreign land. He had a new daughter at home and, I’m sure, plenty of better things to do. The memories of him are among my most prized possessions. Worth more to me than an iPhone or an HDTV. It’s why I love traveling the world and hanging out with geeks.

I’m honored to have shared a beer with him and he definitely left a void in the tech world that won’t easily be filled. Thank you David!

So, last post was about me hitting back at all the personal insults and the inbalance of the blogosphere. As Len Edgerly said in my comments last night we like our junk food more than we like our broccoli, even if the broccoli is better for us.

Dave Winer this morning sent me a clear message: admit you made a mistake and move on.

Danny Sullivan continues the conversation.

First, to Dave Winer. Of COURSE I made a mistake. Anytime you open yourself up to personal attacks the kinds of which have been made on me the past few days that’s explicit evidence that I made a mistake in some kind of judgment. Even I get that. Especially punctuated when you get really smart people like Danny or you to attack.

But Dave’s right. Time to make an accounting of the mistakes and things I have learned.

The reason I’ve been quiet is to figure out what my mistakes were, and to glean some personal learning about it.

Here’s the mistakes I can see I made. I’m sure there’s at least 20 others, most of which have been pointed out in excruciating detail on the blogs I linked to on Monday:

1. Hooking my thesis to a technology that doesn’t have an obvious tie to search. TechMeme.
2. Hooking my thesis to a company that doesn’t yet have a good track record: Mahalo.
3. Attacking SEOs needlessly, which caused all sorts of people, including Danny Sullivan to get their hairs up in a fighting stance.
4. Doing too simplistic an analysis of how Google actually works.
5. Misjudging Google’s speed today. It took literally minutes for it to show up on searches.
6. Misjudging TechMeme’s ability to point at a short post and at video. Turns out if you get enough conversation going it probably will link to a one-word post. Gotta try that someday!
7. Jumping into a battlefront (SEO’s vs. Google) without really understanding how that warfront will go.
8. Not making it clear that I was making some BIG assumptions. Like that Google won’t adopt and that Facebook will open up enough to make it possible to build a new kind of search engine in public on top.
9. Using the form of video, which makes it a lot harder for some people to consume. But, then, I’m doing R&D and am going to continue to use new technologies like Kyte to see what’s good and bad about them.
10. Hooking my thesis to a guy, Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, who has been pushing his stuff so hard lately that lots of people have turned him off. Or worse.

That’s a lot of mistakes for a 20-minute video on a Sunday morning.

But, as Tom Rolander, one of the guys who has made an even bigger mistake in his life and lived to see another day, says “every story has to have 10% fruit juice to be believed.”

So, what’s the fruit juice in my story?

1. Google is getting noisier and isn’t improving as fast as we’d like it. So, anyone who has an idea of how search is going to improve will get listened to. I think this is why Powerset and Spock got so much hype.
2. A lot of people have discovered social networks and services in the past six months. Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, not to mention Upcoming, Yelp, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. And we’re just starting to learn about how those are potentially going to change our life and the services we expect. So, anyone who can see a new pattern in how these will be used will get paid attention to.
3. Anything with a halfway interesting story about how an upstart like Facebook will beat Google will get listened to if for no other reason than to argue about it.
4. There’s a LOT of personal animosity against “a-listers” and anytime an a-lister gives everyone a chance to get that animosity out of their system it will be used.
5. Kyte.tv, the technology I used, is a lightening rod of its own. People either hated it or loved it. Many of you came by the chat room over the last three days and told us that. If you use a new technology to tell an interesting story that’ll increase the chances you’ll get listened to.
6. RSS has such a strong place now in how many of us consume information that when you mess with that reading behavior you’ll increase your chance of getting noticed.

So, to wrap this up. Did I learn my lessons? Are there others that I should have learned that I didn’t pay enough attention to?

Today Buzz took me over to see Steve Ball (he runs the audio and other media teams at Microsoft). Steve let me hold his new daughter. You can see her in this Kyte video that I shot with my Nokia N95 (which is why the video is a bit small and blurry).

Holding someone who is 19 days old is a cathartic experience. She is especially precious. I looked at her and asked myself “how am I making her world better?”

Then I thought about Maryam and Patrick, my son and partner in all things geeky, and Milan, our new son who’ll be here real soon. I haven’t been the best parent I could be. The best husband I could be.

Tonight I looked over my Twitters and blogs. They are angry. Confrontational. Disturbed. Hurt. Dismayed.

Those are not words to describe someone in a state of mind to improve the world. Part of it is so many people are making stuff up about me and/or my employer without any care as to my feelings or the truth that I’ve got to get some distance. Over the weekend a variety of people said I had quit my job. Then another “A-list” blogger said I had been fired. Neither are true. Much of what I read over on that Silicon Valley gossip site lately isn’t true and they have demonstrated over and over that they really don’t care about the truth. It really depresses me cause I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider. Depression isn’t fun.

So, I’m going to try something else for a while.

Add to that the fact that I’ve learned more by having a conversation with an IBM lawyer for 30 minutes than I’ve learned from the average blog lately. Heck, I look at TechMeme and see articles about Glam. A copy of Digg. Instructions for leaking your own TV show on the Net.

Glam?!? Bubble?

This isn’t what gets me excited. In our book Naked Conversations I wrote that a good blog is “authoritative and passionate.” Truth is that when I looked at Steve Ball’s baby I realized I’ve been neither. I’d rather go hang out with someone who is building something interesting.

I’ll be back blogging when I can add value again. My video show at http://www.scobleshow.com will go on (I have a ton of great videos coming this week) and I might do a Kyte video or two since I’m doing R&D there for PodTech. I’ve been having a ball with videos in both places lately and you’ve probably noticed that the quality of the videos is going up. I can’t wait for you to see the vid I filmed with Marc Canter at Gnomedex.

Anyway, have a great week and while I’m not blogging I’d love it if you left some ideas on things you’d like me to learn for when I get back.

If you visit Pacific Grove you’ll see no visible reminders of the once-great Digital Research, makers of CPM. There are no plaques. No historical markers. It’s just the fading memory of people who were part of the computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It’s why I try to interview as many “grey beards” as possible, so we can get these stories down before they disappear forever.

Here we take a walking tour with Tom Rolander (one of the key executives at Digital Research). You see the house where IBM visited and tech industry history was changed forever.

By the way, in the first part of my interview with Tom Rolander he mentioned a libel lawsuit with Tim Paterson, the guy who sold DOS to Bill Gates. Well, Tim gives his part of the story on his blog. This is a remarkable age where we can get perspectives on a significant historical event from the people involved.

I wonder how we can preserve all of these perspectives so that people 100 or, even, 1,000 years from now can understand what happened and why the world has Microsoft and not Digital Research? After all, we still talk about CocaCola’s beginnings and its impact on the world. Did you know that CocaCola’s bottling rights were sold for $1?

One thing is I hope others join me in getting important historical stories on video. If you have someone in your life who played a key role in tech industry history I’d love to see them talk about it. The folks who built the personal computer industry are now 50 to 60 years old. We’ve already lost many who came before, like Hewlett and Packard. It would be a shame to lose these stories forever since we now have the ability to get them down and share them with the world.

Mike Arrington notes that Google is walling off its news garden and keeping other services from spidering it.

Mike is right to point this out as hypocrisy. Google is making money off of other people’s work and wants to have some exclusivity.

Imagine if they did this with Blogger. To tell you the truth I’m very shocked Google hasn’t behaved like this earlier.

Here’s why walled gardens are important to companies (and why we hate them).

Let’s say we were going to develop a competitor to Google News or TechMeme.

Now, I’ve been reading quite a few feeds. Probably about 1/4 as many as the Google News algorithm, but enough to understand how to build a competitor.

There are a few stages to figuring out what is important news.

1) Parse the various parts of a post and put it into buckets. For instance, look at this item about GigaOm getting a new CEO. There’s the headline and the text. Then let’s look at the component parts. There’s who wrote it “CEO Smack”. There’s the subject matter “GigaOm” and “new COO.” Then there’s the body where you probably can find a variety of other important terms. “San Francisco” “Blog” “Om Malik” “Growth” “Paul Walborsky” “sales, operations, conferences” “Hercules Technology Growth Capital” and a link to TechCrunch.
2) Look at the inbound links. In this case there are none, but this is a ranking mechanism. More links means more important news.
3) Look at the comments. Are there any? How fast were they received? How many?
4) Use a human news judgment on the source of the news (is CEO Smack more or less important than, say, News.com, or TechCrunch?)
5) Look at how many times this story has been written about on blogs elsewhere in the past few hours.
6) Look for “news” verbs like “just released” or “new” or “beta” or “exclusive.”
7) Look for “news nouns” like “Microsoft” “Google” “Apple” “Facebook.” (Or whatever company you wanted to track).

Are there other things to study? Not many.

So, how do you get a better display of news than anyone else?

1) Get readers to vote. AKA Digg.
2) Get readers to add comments. AKA new Google stuff.
3) Track readers’ clicking behavior. If you know everyone is clicking on Paris Hilton stories instead of some new software for Facebook, wouldn’t that be valuable to you?
4) Get readers to send in their own news.

Are there many other ways to get a better display?

Now, how do you keep a better display? Easy. Wall it off. Keep your competitors from using the stuff that makes your display special. That way they’ll have to figure out a way to get it on their own rather than just spidering your display results and using that as a bootstrap to build upon.

Personally, the more I look at it, the more I understand what Google’s doing.

How about you?

The reason we hate them? Exactly because of that reason. We can’t bootstrap off of them and build something better.

Oh, and we don’t like it that companies are making profits off of our work. It +is+ our work that is building TechMeme and Google News, isn’t it? Yes. So why not share the profits back with the people who are helping make the system special?

Evil or not? That is the question.

You’ve heard the stories about how Microsoft and Bill Gates got the operating system business with IBM and how Gary Kildall and Digital Research lost the deal.

But I’ve always wondered about why Gary was out flying that day.

So when I got a chance to sit down with Gary Kildall’s best friend and FLYING PARTNER that day I jumped at the chance. That’s Tom Rolander who held a key role inside Digital Research (the folks who made CPM which, back before the IBM PC, was one of the most popular personal computer OS of the day — my dad had a CPM card for our Apple IIs so we could run software designed for it).

This is still the biggest business story in the tech industry. It is one that business school students will study for a long time.

It’s a story of arrogance. Legal misjudgments. Misjudging the players. And an abiding deep friendship that comes through.

If there’s a piece of video that will probably outlast me this is it.

Actually there’s four pieces. The first hour you meet Tom and hear the story of when IBM came to visit. That’s the interview that was put up today.

The second piece takes us to a restaurant where Tom tells lots of fun early industry stories.

The third piece takes us on a tour of Pacific Grove which is where Digital Research was located. We take you to the house where IBM visited Digital Research.

The fourth piece is where Tom introduces you to his new company, Crossloop, which is developing software to enable you to help others with their computer problems.

One interesting thing you’ll learn?

Bill Gates and Microsoft didn’t want the operating system business and sent IBM down to Digital Research.

Oh, and thank you to Tom and Mrinal Desai of Crossloop. He wrote me a few weeks ago on Facebook and said that his new boss was the one flying with Gary Kildall that fateful day.

Have you ever blown a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business deal? Me neither.

But now you can say you’ve met one of the guys who can say that.

Another thing you’ll learn? Why we all owe a debt of gratitude to Gary Kildall for the modern operating system architecture.

There’s a lot more, but it’s better just to watch the videos. Hope you find this as interesting as I do.

Oh, and if someone can post these to Gary Kildall’s wikipedia page, I’d be most grateful.

The beginning of the video brings introductions — I started filming the minute we got out of my car (you meet Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, and Patrick Scoble, my son, and Mrinal). I think this is interesting stuff so we don’t edit it. The meat of the story starts up at about 16 minutes into the video, but I think you’ll find the rest of the conversation interesting. It’s one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever been a part of.

This conversation demonstrates why I pinch myself every morning.

I have a quick chat with Larry Magid of CBS News (and PodTech) and Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

Don’t know who he is? He is one of the most celebrated old-timers at IBM. Just retired but is chairman emeritus. You should read his bio. Dr. Irving isn’t your average geek.

He talks about virtual worlds and large systems. It takes two interviewers to keep up with him. And I’m only halfway joking about that.

I could listen to smart people like this for hours. Even better, he has a blog so we can read what is on his mind.

Hope you enjoy. Tomorrow you get to hear the story of how Microsoft got the operating system business instead of Digital Research. I am still amazed at that story and you’ll want to listen along.

Microsoft’s Office team should run, don’t walk, to the nearest Apple store and buy the new iWork, which includes a spreadsheet app called “Numbers.”

This is the iPhone of spreadsheets. Lots of wow. Cool. Kickass.

But no developer API. Yet.

No collaboration. Yet.

Hey, this does sound like the iPhone.

But when you sit down to use Numbers as I did today after the press conference you see a few things.

1) You can have multiple spreadsheets on a canvas and you can resize and drag them around.
2) It feels very comfortable if you’re an Excel user.
3) Writing formulas rocks. Yeah, you can write syntax like “=sum(D2:F22)” but Apple goes one further. Uses the names of rows and columns you come up with. And has a nice little auto sum feature. Underneath it writes “=sum(monthlyreport:employee)” instead of the more obtuse (D2:F22).
4) Lots of templates aimed at regular people and what they tend to use spreadsheets for. Budgeting, lists of things, etc.
5) The UI feels much nicer than Microsoft’s stuff does. Much more interactive and easy to use.

But it is a 1.0 product. No macros. No pivot tables. Microsoft’s profits are safe for now.

This does provide a sizeable poke in Microsoft’s ribs, though, and reminds us all that even a spreadsheet can be made a lot better if you take a new look at it. Apple has sent us all a gesture that they are working on their own office suite. It’s one that everyone should take a look at.

Yeah, you can go over to Engadget or Gizmodo or some Apple-oriented blog (MacSurfer is my favorite because it links to anything that moves in the Apple space).

I’m sure they’ll all do an awesome job of covering tomorrow’s Apple press conference with text, pictures, video, and analysis. It starts at about 10 a.m.

But I’m going to take a different trail. I’m going to use my Kyte.tv channel. I’ll be answering the chat there live. And posting video and audio and other things.

What’s cool about that? Well, you can post videos to my channel! And the live chat there can include audio, text, or video. I’ll be reporting from my Mac and maybe my cell phone (do you think it’d be rude to pull out a Nokia during an Apple press conference? Heh! I guess that’s one way to make the point that the iPhone really needs video capabilities to be considered a great phone).

Oh, and Hugh Macleod will be happy to know that my Mac has a Microsoft blue monster on it. So, the blue monster is going to Apple. Ahh, the fun!

Who is that in the picture above? New York Times tech journalist David Pogue. He wrote a book on the iPhone titled the missing manual.

I wasn’t the one who recognized David to tell the truth. He was having lunch at Bucks when my son recognized him (my son says that Pogue did the best iPhone video). My son is really the one who should go tomorrow. He knows more about Apple than most Apple employees do. He’ll be watching from PodTech’s offices. I’m sure he’ll give us some reactions too.