Stories by: Shane Schick

AMD's decision to move into the business PC market this week reminds me of the first line of Shopgirl, a novella by Steve Martin, which points out that working in the glove department at a large retail store means "you are selling things that nobody buys anymore."

Even though it seems to signal a shift from its PC-centric corporate philosophy, I wouldn't call Microsoft's Live Mesh offering a disruptive technology. If anything, it's an accommodating technology.

As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we're all talking about cloud computing doesn't mean we're talking about the same thing.

You didn't have to know that Dave DeWalt is the CEO of McAfee to realize he is an American visiting Canada this week. No one up here is quite so tanned in April. But that wasn't the only way DeWalt stood out to me as a leader of the world's second-largest security software firm.

I guess calling them MIDs is better than calling them unlaptops, or smart nonphones, but not by much.

The first thing they told us when a group of local media sat down with the head of HP's worldwide software division last week is that the company has a policy of not discussing its competitors. This, despite the fact that one of them happily answered my questions about the BMC takeover of BladeLogic a week or two ago, and despite the fact that the executive in question, Tom Hogan, wasted no time in bringing up IBM.

Shortly after covering the integration of Cognos products into IBM's software division, I got a call from Microsoft, which wanted to discuss PerformancePoint Server, which it launched last year. I'm used to the fact that writing about one vendor's product will lead to interest from its competitors, but I decided to hear them out. Despite its claims to the contrary, Microsoft is still relatively new to BI, and it's interesting to see them go after a market in which they are not already dominant.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that you could build an addition to your datacentre by stuffing some equipment in a separate container. It just takes a genius to secure the intellectual property for it.

IT associations in Canada, Australia and the UK have gained Microsoft's support in their efforts to create an accreditation for technology professionals that would be recognised anywhere in the world.

Forrester Research will not stop until it has found a satisfied corporate Vista customer.

It's a good thing Ray Ozzie had Steve Ballmer backing him up, because Ray Ozzie wears glasses and Microsoft's investors sound like they're ready to hit a guy with glasses right about now.