The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
There’s an enlightening and interesting article up on InformationWeek discussing the Leopard server product. It’s basically a guy who headed out to the sites covering public information on Leopard server and summarized it. It’s still a good read. My favorite piece? Clustering for email and iCal servers!
One thing the author did mention is that while it’s compelling for SMB, Leopard server isn’t shaping up to be an enterprise-bound powerhouse. I would agree in that respect, but I diverge away from this when he declares that Apple just clearly isn’t aiming for this market.
If you thought your Exchange deployment ever made your life miserable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you’re the Exchange admin of a small business deployment, you’re likely to strut around your office and just tell people to get over it.
If you’re an admin of a large enterprise, March is your Month of Suffering. Prepare to sob like a baby.
Congress enacted this little thing called Daylight Saving Time, right? Well, then they decided to make it happen three weeks sooner in the year 2007. They passed this law in 2005.
So, Aquatix pointed out (correctly) that the coffee-n-cream theme didn’t have a login button. File that one under WTF.
Part of the reason I keep changing these themes is because I keep finding little items missing. While I like Sapphire significantly, it takes out the blogroll. That sucks because I really want you to visit my friends and I find it pretty important to link to them. File that under Suck.
You know you’re a Linux badass when you’ve got everything working… and I mean everything:
It’s all working. The only thing that doesn’t work… and it’s because I’ve purposefully not put any effort into it… is my TV card. That TV card is going to end up in a MythTV box somewhere. Just because.
(info: this post was started several days ago)
There’s so much more that can be said about Microsoft and the mistakes they are continuing to make. In my experience, product quality is going down… regression bugs are coming back into some products (Exchange 2003 and clustering!)… many enterprise products are a mishmash of spaghetti code… argh, it’s a tough time to be an enterprise admin with Microsoft products.
There’s been a renaissance of Linux here in my house, led by the Mac issue and Not Having Money. I intend to replace all of the workstations with Macs, but in the meantime, I’ve dual-booted my system with Ubuntu Edgy and Windows. Now here’s the kicker: I’ve not booted into Windows in about three weeks, maybe longer. Taitai’s system is still on Windows because Linux is pretty rough around the edges, but she will be the first recipient of a new Mac when the first one is actually purchased.
So what do you do with a day off when the system still manages to go down?
Well, you spend most of the day on the phone, honestly. That gets old. We had the day planned to spend running around town knocking out personal business that has been put aside for far too long. It was little things like – setting up bank accounts, scoping out schools for BunBun, stuff like that. But still, somehow… we end up on the phone together.
