Thoughts

It was only a matter of time before someone was going to ask the final "what if" question for Internet users.

I'm sorry, but you're dead. Now what happens to your gigabytes of online data, Websites, automatic payments, and "virtual money"?

A new category of online services is emerging: A "Last Will and Testament" for Internet assets. It's just the start, and perhaps we'll see businesses producing "daemons" or "after-death worms" delivering payloads that represent your interests in perpetuity.

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism does a fantastic job reporting annually on the state of the American news media.  The Pew Project's sixth edition for 2009 is no exception and provides lessons for all businesses on the importance of agility, adaptability, and competitiveness.  The following paragraph from the report's introduction says it all.

Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.

This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.

It is also the bleakest.

Julia Angwin of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote that she wanted to remake herself into a new person...at least into a new person as seen by Google.  When Ms Angwin searched on Google using her own name she continued to see an old article written by her on top of the search results page .  Although the link to the old article was popular, she didn't feel the article was her best work nor that it reflected who she was today.  She then starts on an adventure into search engine optimization (SEO) as she tries to get what she tries to get the search engine to list instead the artides and Internet sites she would want people to see on top of the search results page.

Mary Jander of Internet Evolution takes a hard look at at what IT must do to survive the next few years of economic woes.  She has some sobering things to say, and while we might not like it, she is probably right.  For example, in her first step to IT surviving she says:

Staff levels must go down. Job cuts are now a fact of IT life. Recent announcements portend 5,000 layoffs at Microsoft; a projected 6,000 at Intel; up to 10,000 at IBM. Cuts like these could decimate an already-pressed IT staff, unless measures are taken to automate and virtualize more functions.

The idea of reducing costs in hardware and human resources through virtualization has been suggested before (many times). Now is the time to finally give it a try.

Not long ago I wrote that KDE 4 might produce enough changes to its look and feel to help Linux become more Mac-like.  At the time, Windows Vista seemed to be trying to move in the same direction.  Interestingly, someone has noted that Windows 7 now appears to be moving towards Linux's direction with the Windows desktop looking more like KDE 3.5.

During weeks like this, I wonder why I live in South Dakota. Why, didn't I stick with the "plan" and stay here for only three years?

I know what most of you are thinking and let me address what is on your mind at this very moment. No, I'm not blinded with nerd goggles.  In fact, I'm currently writing this post from a Windows Vista PC while my wife in the next room is on her MacBook Pro.  Windows and OS X have earned their roles on the computer stage and I would be the last person to dismiss these great operating systems.  However, these days I'm finding that Linux has just as much of a right to this stage when debating the value of operating systems.  

Ironic how the world can change so quickly.  Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers.  Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software.  Something nasty is brewing out there.

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

Initial reports by Brian Krebbs, Security Fix and The Register.

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.