Windows NT, Microsoft’s secret enemy

Microsoft’s latest Windows software this year isn’t all about the desktop, it is a new version of Windows Server 2003 that will be the first in several years. While it is conventional wisdom that Linux is its biggest competitor, my thought for today is that Linux will have to take a second seat to the real challenge: getting people to convert from NT. Surprise: Microsoft’s secret enemy is inertia, or itself.

At our XChange conference last week, a representative from Redmond stated that there are at least 4 million NT servers out in the wild that are ripe for the upgrading. (And that isn’t counting all the ones on Microsoft’s own network either. Or maybe it is.) Our own surveys done for the upcoming State of Enterprise Spending issue at VARBusiness show that enterprises are still moderately investing in NT, holding about the same market share as Linux at 37 percent. No matter whose numbers you trust, that’s a lot of NT lying around that no one is too thrilled about having to touch going forward.

You can read the entire essay here.

Google dating

My working example for the past several years of a New Yorker
Internet-related cartoon has been “On the Internet no one
knows you are dog” — spoken by one canine as he is typing on
his PC, no doubt using some form of doggie IM. Well, I am
going to have to update my mental cartoon archive — a more
recent panel featured two guys in a bar, one saying to the
other “I can’t explain it — it’s just a funny feeling that
I’m being Googled.”

Well now, my world has changed. We live in scarier times.
Mistrust is everywhere. What better way to check out a
potential girl/boyfriend than to Google them, as first
reported in the New York Observer about two years ago?
Some people call this Google dating.

You can read the entire essay here.