I’m working through a few things today and decide to go put on the Steve Ballmer/Guy Kawasaki Mix08 keynote from yesterday as background music, if you will. I expected something fairly lightweight, non-controversial, basically Ballmer reading through another TelePrompTer speech.

Nope.

Guy fired off hard question after hard question (“So why does Microsoft want to buy Yahoo?”, “Do you get up every morning thinking of ways of to kill Google?” (paraphrase, but not by much)) While Ballmer ducked a couple of questions (“How are going to get acquiring Yahoo past the antitrust people?”) he was a hell of a lot more candid than I’ve ever heard him before.

Hence my title for this post - either Steve and Guy weren’t drinking water in the Mix08 green room before this, there’s something more in this new batch of Starbucks coffee I’m drinking, or Ballmer has changed from the take no prisoners kind of guy I remember. Hell, he even gave out his email address: steveb@microsoft.com.

If you have some filing to do, put this on the screen today - it was fascinating.