Talk about a clean exit — hours after Microsoft's point man in the war on Google steps down, his name's off the public website and the official report's out to Bloomberg News. How can you cut a clean break like newly fired MSN Marketing Chief Martin Taylor?

"You get a letter with an unbranded CD," shouts a writer at Scaryideas.com about a supposed Microsoft entrapment campaign. The story's making the rounds again on social bookmark sites like Reddit.

Bill Gates's Microsoft retirement memo didn't need such a fancy translation. His Valleyspeak could be summed up with a classic trick from Slate. The online magazine pulled out an archived article from its days as a Microsoft property. The schtick: use MS Word's Autosummarize feature to whittle a document down to the nitty gritty.

Another official memo, another official string of bull: After his retirement announcement, Microsoft founder Bill Gates sent an all-hands internal memo that the press passed around this weekend. The Valleyspeak dialect has a native speaker up in MS's Redmond HQ, so pay attention to what Gates says and what he means.

The Microsoft-eBay merger rumors are true. EBay has the power here, or at least Microsoft thinks so. They spun Bill Gates' (pictured, duh) retirement as his chance to fully run his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The president of a major web company tells the Wag:

As of Sunday afternoon, Microsoft France was, well, partially invaded by Turkish hackers redLine, rudeb0y, Ejder, The_Bekir, SaCReDSeeR, and ASH (sic). The kiddies took down the subdomain http://experts.microsoft.fr and slapped up a notice promising to hack Microsoft.com. So far, the front page of Microsoft.fr (which redirects to Microsoft.com/France) is unharmed.

Oh joy, two Microsoft gotchas in one day!

President George W. Bush, asked to name a mistake he'd made since 9/11:

It was just another innocent post by ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble:

In the booming Silicon Valley economy, everyone's looking to buy or be bought. But not all offers are equal. How do you politely turn down a lowball without burning your bridge? Let's take a look at three turn-downs — none of which were publicly reported.

Microsoft just announced that in 2008, chairman Bill Gates will "transition out of a day-to-day role" as chief software architect and focus on his non-profit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Of course, it's a fancy way to say Gates is retiring. A veteran Valley journalist says, "'Chairman' is Silicon Valley for 'don't wanna work any more.' It's also code for 'visionary' which is, in turn, code for 'can't get a product out the door.'"

For years, the official press line was that Microsoft is like the Borg, assimilating companies into its cold, heartless race. But now the party line goes, "Google is the new Microsoft." It comes up in the New York Times' Google Oregon complex story:

As we hunt for the next A-list Microsoft blogger after Robert Scoble's departure, keep in mind some odds from the ever-clever blog Make You Go Hmm. Here's blogger TDavid's handicapping, with his clever analysis stripped out and my breezy commentary subbed in.

Candidate two in the search for the new Robert Scoble is RoboScoble (conceived by Candidate One, Niall Kennedy). Niall points RoboScoble.com to a feed of Windows Live bloggers, but imagine the possibilities of a real virtual Scoble:

Who's the next Robert Scoble, asked Valleywag, after the A-list blogger left Microsoft this weekend. Sure, there are dozens of Microsoft bloggers working on Windows Live alone, but they're all too boring and qualified. The blogosphere needs someone who's all talk to fill the Scoble shoes.

So yeah, as you probably didn't hear because, unlike all these bloggers, you have a life — Microsoft blogger and apologist Robert Scoble just quit Microsoft to work for John Furrier's Podtech podcast network.

In case you have a life on the weekends, you ought to know that famed Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is now just blogger Robert Scoble. Shocking, yes! Tom Foremski broke the news on Saturday (when you were at a barbecue or party or something — loser) and soon Scoble was up on his blog yelling that the rumors are false.

• Today's "Reason that San Francisco is cooler than San Jose" is a warning to vegetarians: In Silicon Valley, waiters forcibly stuff meat down your throat. [Metroactive]

• In a fit of business brilliance, Microsoft launched a paid PC care service, thus profiting from the shittiness of its own products. [Australian IT]

Time for another roundup of the top dogs in tech, with names in bold for easy skimmin':