Happy Birthday to my Adventure Racing buddy Andy, a mucky muck with Microsoft.

As a present, I’d like to highlight all the things the Evil Empire MS has done right lately, starting with their new search engine.

I tried Bing and found it nearly as good as Google. That’s a huge improvement over the old Live Search.

Microsoft is already seeing a Bing bump in market share.

Famously incompetent in advertising, Microsoft has hit a sore spot in their recent Laptop Hunters Apple bashing TV commercials.

Gamers are abuzz talking about the recently debuted MS technology, the badly named “Natal” Motion Control for Xbox 36. Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

And I’m hearing great things about the next Zune, the MS iPod competitor.

I’m not yet hearing that “Microsoft is Cool”. But Andy is Cool.