Barney Pell, CEO of Powerset (a company that’s building a new kind of search engine) tells me that Microsoft has caught up to Google in search relevancy (he was at the Bil conference yesterday). There are companies that are paid to track such things and he’s been watching their reports.

That made me realize that I haven’t tried a search over on Microsoft’s Live.com lately.

It also might explain why Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo.

After all, let’s say that it’s correct that Microsoft is about to pass Google in relevancy. Would anyone switch? No. Not until they demonstrate that Microsoft is dramatically better than Google.

But, what if they combined Yahoo and Microsoft’s search result quality? And put Yahoo’s brand name on it?

Now I am starting to understand a little why this merger makes Google nervous (at least publicly).

I just don’t believe the relevancy reports, though. I did a single search on something I know about, CERN, and Google’s list is more useful and more relevant than Microsoft’s. Plus, I know how to pull things back out of Google that I’ve written on my blog. In my experience Microsoft’s engine isn’t nearly as good at that task, which will keep any blogger from singing Microsoft’s praises.

But it really doesn’t matter, does it? Google is just so embedded in my brain that I don’t know what Microsoft could do.

Of course then I look at Mahalo and Wikipedia and I see exactly what I’d do if I were running the search team at Microsoft.

But, instead, Microsoft is going to waste billions of dollars trying to buy a better brand name than it already has.

Maybe Microsoft should just fire its marketing department and start rebuilding its brands from the ground up. Take a 10-year approach. That’d STILL be cheaper than $40 billion.

Oh, well. Yet another thing to ask Microsoft executives at Mix this week.

I left Microsoft almost two years ago and even before I left I heard “wait until you see what Ray Ozzie is doing.” For two years I’ve checked in occassionally with his team to see if they are ready and for two years I’ve heard silence.

So, now it looks like they are going to bring out their Web Services strategy at Mix this week.

I have some questions, though.

1. My wife’s blog is on Microsoft’s Live Spaces and it’s always been slow, slow, slow. So, why should we believe that Microsoft’s new Web Services are going to be fast, fast, fast?
2. Hotmail doesn’t work very well on non-Internet Explorer browsers. So, why should we believe that Microsoft’s new Web Services are going to be really standards based?
3. When I left Microsoft very few employees focused their work on the Internet. In fact, the day I left I read all of Bill Gates’ Thinkweek papers. Only about 10% had anything to do with Internet stuff and only a small fraction of those had anything to do with Web Services. So, why should we believe that Microsoft’s smartest people are focused on this effort?
4. When I’ve gotten a look into Google’s data centers I see they are outstripping Microsoft’s efforts everywhere. Google even builds its own disk drivers to optimize the speed at which data gets taken off of those Seagate drives (I only saw Seagate drives in the data center I got into. Disclaimer: Seagate is now sponsoring my show on FastCompany.tv) and put into your browser. Microsoft, however, relies on outside developers to build much of the drivers that run its equipment. So, why should be believe that Microsoft will build infrastructure that can beat that of Google or Amazon? (Thanks to open source, Google rolls much of its innovative work in infrastructure back into Linux, which is open to other data center providers, like those you see running Amazon’s Web Services).
5. Internet services, when new, are almost always brittle. Remember eBay in its early days? It was down for two days straight. Lately? We haven’t heard a story like that about eBay in many years. Amazon and Google have had Web Services running for years now and, while they still have an occassional burp, are fairly robust and are reliable. Many businesses are now getting to the point where they trust these services to stay up. Why should be believe that Microsoft’s new services will stay up under load?

If Ray Ozzie can answer these questions then the world might start paying attention. Either way, looks like it’s a good thing I’m going to Mix.

I love this blog. Why? Because it makes me smarter.

This will probably get on Valleywag. They love it when geeks get together on a Friday night to make really embarrassing funny videos. Which we did. The video? It’s for a SXSW party themed around Rock Band, that fun video game where you get together with your friends and play music together on an Xbox.

Here’s a little peek and a little longer peek at what we were doing in the Revision 3 studios tonight. I just know this is going to be one of those things I wish I didn’t get talked into…

Oh, and the woman in the middle? Her brother is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Is that Dave McClure on drums? Damn, what a wig! Yeah, you’re gonna read about this on Valleywag all right.

In the middle of the frivolity I try to interview Revision 3’s CEO, Jay Adelson. Hey, I work for Fast Company now, so gotta get some business in there! Revision 3 produces a ton of video shows, including Diggnation.

On a more serious note, ReadWrite Web looks at what could be the breakout hit of SXSW (last year it was Twitter). I still have my money on Upcoming.org. Everyone was talking about the list of parties for SXSW.

Wow, just spent an hour walking through some of Annie Leibovitz’ new photography at her just-opened exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum. She gives us a tour and I bring you along with a front-row look. Thank you to Qik and my Nokia cell phone for making this kind of video possible. Unfortunately I could only record about 40 minutes or so of her walk through the museum, but that was most of it. Later I asked her about how much time people give her, and told her that Bill Gates only gave me 17 minutes to interview him. She said Bill only gave her 10 minutes. Now I’m even more impressed with her work. I thought her subjects gave her hours to work. After all, she is THE most famous celebrity photographer of our time (she hates the word “celebrity” by the way, believes famous people are just people).

My hands are shaking, this was such a big thrill for me. She’s one of those people I’ve always looked up to and enjoyed her work. One person, who introduced her before I started my video, said that he felt that Annie has captured his age’s popular culture.

Oh, and thank you to Marc Silber, professional photographer (you see him in the video a couple of times). He went to school with her and invited me and Rocky along. Marc and I are going to do some amazing things for Photowalking. We filmed this on our professional cameras, you can see Rocky, my producer, in the background on the first video.

It’s an amazing exhibition of her work, highly recommended if you’re into photography.

I love TED Talks, it’s really great that they share those with us. Here’s the one that was given yesterday about the WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft. “It is truly transformative,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. See you on Monday with a much better demo than the attendees at TED got.

I’m over Rocky Barbanica’s house and he’s editing shows for FastCompany.tv. You get a look at his setup (lots of gear!) and how he does his work on this Qik/cell phone video. I’ll be at Qik later today, so more from there. You get a taste of John Kao’s piano playing, too. Wow this stuff looks awesome in HD. I wish we could deliver you our HD source files.

Lots of people are asking me questions about what made me cry at Microsoft a few weeks ago.

If I told you “a telescope” you’d make fun of me, right? Tell me I’m lame and that I don’t deserve to be a geek and that I should run away and join the circus, right?

Well, that’s what I saw.

Or, more accurately, the WorldWide Telescope.

UPDATE: the official site is now up.

Like I said, sounds lame. How could that possibly be the most fabulous thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in years? And that’s not just me talking. My friends who’ve seen it say that I actually underhyped it. That’s the first time anyone has said I underhyped something when I was trying to be so over-the-top with hype.

Like I said, it isn’t the product that’s impressive. You’ve gotta see this thing to really understand. My video will be up on Monday.

But, I’ll try to give you an idea of what made me so impressed.

Think of Google Maps or Microsoft’s Live Maps. How dragging a map around lets you see the world in a new way. Zoom in. Zoom out. You have the whole world in a window on your screen.

Now, think of the sky.

When Brian Cox, physicist at CERN, spoke at LIFT last year he told us to hold our hands out, put our thumb up and realize there are hundreds of thousands of stars in just that small patch of sky.

Now you’ve probably looked at imagery from the Hubble Telescope. So you know there are entire galaxies out there. But what are you missing?

Context.

In other words, you have no idea where in the sky those things you see in Sky and Telescope magazine are. You’re missing context.

So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy shit, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

Now the magic happened.

Curtis Wong said: “let’s switch to a different telescope and see what these two galaxies colliding are spitting out.”

He clicked a button and we saw a completely different view of the same colliding galaxies. This time we weren’t looking at visible light, but at something else. I think it might have been infrared, or maybe a look at other kinds of radiation being kicked out. He had about 10 of the world’s telescopes to look at. I forget all the names, but that detail is in the video coming on Monday.

Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Pan over to Mars. What a glorious view. You’ve never seen Mars like that through your $2,000 Celestron Telescope.

Oh, you have one of those nice Celestron telescopes with the motorized base? Click a button and your telescope points to what you’re looking at in this piece of software.

And there’s a ton more, the demo just goes on and on and on.

Some other things.

1. It’s dedicated to Jim Gray, the Microsoft Researcher who sailed out of San Francisco Bay about a year ago never to be heard from again. He started this project with a paper back in 2002.
2. It runs only on Windows. It’s coded in C#/.NET, you’ll meet the developer in our video and you’ll hear more about that then.
3. It’s free, but only in a private alpha right now. I’m not sure when it’ll be released to the public. I bet that we’ll find that out at Microsoft’s Tech Fest next week (TechCrunch and other bloggers are going to that, so Im sure we’ll hear lots more details on the other cool stuff Microsoft Research is doing).
4. There are terabytes of data, all seamlessly integrated for the first time here.
5. There are narrations and tours. I believe you can even add your own, so you can leave a little tour for your kids to see the sky in a new way.
6. Mike Arrington and Dan Farber figured it out first.

So, why cry over a telescope?

Because I just saw the world I live in, er, excuse me, the universe I live in in a new way that I never had imagined before.

I cried because I imagined all the kids, like my sons, who will be inspired by what they see. It took me back to the days when John Kennedy wanted us to go to the moon. Hint: there’s a lot more out there to explore.

I cried because I realized just how much work, money, and all that went into making these images. I never had access to them before. Certainly not in this way so I could compare them by clicking a button. As a taxpayer who’s helped pay for some of these telescopes it’s the first time I’ve seen the results of my and your, investments in our scientific research.

It’s human to look out at the sky and wonder what’s going on out there. This takes us a LOT further into our understanding of just what is.

And,, yes, that’s worth crying some inspirational tears. Thank you to Microsoft Research for inspiring me in a way that Microsoft hasn’t inspired me in years.

And, also, sorry to the teams that I caused some PR troubles for. I hope you’ll forgive me for getting a little excited. I couldn’t contain myself. It isn’t everyday that you get to see such an inspiring piece of software.

Wow, what an afternoon. First I did a very quick, or is that “Qik” interview of David Marcus, founder of Zong, which is a mobile content delivery platform, which was announced today. Then we went went over to John Kao’s office, where we had a long interview, that’ll run Monday as part of our launch of FastCompany.tv, but here’s a little taste, thanks to my cell phone. He taught business at Harvard for 14 years, is a professional-grade musician, among many other things which you’ll discover in our “professional grade” interview that we did with our brand new hi-def camcorders (we’ll talk more about our equipment next week). I wish I was 1/100th the man that John is. Just getting some awesome people onto video. Who’s next?

Who knew that NASDAQ developers could do cool stuff? (That’s the stock market in the USA where lots of tech companies are listed). Check out their new app, shipping soon, that lets investors “replay” the market and make sure they are getting a fair price.