Doom and Gloom for Windows?

Ran across this article today about the future of Microsoft. Gartner (a pretty respected company that analyses and reports on trends in IT) is claiming that Microsoft "faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts". Interesting thing though. Linux doesn't seem to be picking up steam at the desktop level and, for a business, the Mac (although a beautiful work of art) is generally more expensive and incompatible with most client/server business software. So, who is the competition? The article brings up a good point in that there is not any competition in the enterprise space except for themselves (Microsoft). I would say that the SaaS space is where the competition is ultimately going to come from. When everything (or almost everything) becomes browser based, it won't matter what desktop OS you have, it just has to be compatible with the applications you are trying to run from wherever they may be on whatever you may have in your hand at the time (pc, phone, etc..).

Until later - Enjoy!

Data Centers Heating Pools??

Ran across this article today which lead me to this article from IBM, and thought it was interesting and innovative enough to rant about. It is from a site called 'GreenerComputing'. As a person who is pretty familiar with a smaller data center and the amount of heat that gets produced, coupled with my desire to use alternative forms of energy (I would love to have wind turbine in my back yard), I thought this was pretty cool. The innovation is intriguing and I am sure that even on smaller scales you could do similar projects. Here is a quick example of how much heat gets generated from a small data-center. A few years ago, we had a data center that was comprised of a mid-size phone switch, and about 6 servers. Occasionally the 'chiller' would stop working and the room would start to heat up. Once, this happened on the weekend and nobody was around to respond to it. One of our team members happened to stop in and heard the alarm going off. The room had heated up to about 125 degrees and as soon as he opened the door, it instantly fogged up his glasses (this was before the days when servers would shut themselves off when they got too warm). Needless to say we installed a remote monitoring system that called our phones when the temp got to warm. Imagine what you could do with the heat that is being wasted by larger data centers????

Anyway - Enjoy!!

Ranting about Starbucks

OK - so this all started from a conversation I had with my father-in-law. He was telling me that he heard that the biggest competition that Starbucks has is McDonald's. Now that they are serving specialty coffee's and tea's, McDonald's is taking aim at the big Buck (literally and figuratively). He also informed me that because of this apparent pressure from Mickey D's Starbucks has modified the taste they have and made it milder (read - not burnt tasting).

Now, I don't really have anything against Starbucks, except that I prefer other coffee over theirs due to the fact that I don't like the aftertaste. Some tell me that I need to 'acquire the taste', (sounds like beer) but I really prefer a smoother coffee. Funny thing though, I don't really enjoy much else that has a burnt taste. I don't like burnt french fries, I don't like burnt toast, and I don't like burnt coffee. I have to say I like Beaners better. The exception to that is when I go to really nice restaurants, they always seem to have great coffee.

Back to the rant. So I started looking for articles that would tell me about what I heard. This is what I found. Turns out that Consumer Reports actually said that McDonald's coffee is actually preferred to Starbucks. To some people I know (you know who you are) this is borderline blasphemy! The part I thought was funny though is that for years, people have developed an attitude about Starbucks, almost an elitist attitude, that if you don't like Starbucks coffee, you must really not be a coffee aficionado. It is part of the huge success that Starbucks has had over the past decade. Then when the market forces change and people really start drinking the coffee they like, Starbucks is forced to change their taste. Guess the elitist are out of luck.

In the process of looking for this information, I found this graphic. It shows both Starbucks and McDonald's and their respective global footprint. I thought it was a good use of a visual system to get a point across so I sent it off to a friend a work (with whom I chat about how to effectively show data from time to time) and he sent me back this site which shows a funny relationship between Starbucks and Walmart. It is almost an inverse relationship. If you have a higher concentration of Walmart's, you have a lower concentration of Starbuks and vice versa. Back to my thoughts on the elitist attitude.

So, this turned out to be a longer rant, but I had a lot of fun writing it. Hope you enjoyed it also! Chat at you next time.....