Tabloid: Opinions

Can Cellnet's founders turn the ailing distributor around?

I was once renowned and reviled for my lack of regard for Visual Basic. I have since reformed, realising that we all benefit from languages that target developers at different skill levels and shorten the distance between concept and delivery. Modern server compute power and capacity more than offset the performance limitations of Visual Basic and its follow-ons .Net and Java.

Although it was just Turkey Day [Thanksgiving] here in the US, I've been feasting on the baloney coming out of Sony BMG. After stonewalling for two weeks, the music giant finally recalled its XCP copy-protected CDs and set up a disc exchange program. (Contrary to what I said in a recent column, however, Sony's "fix" doesn't remove the rootkit, only the cloaking.) Meanwhile, it seems XCP may itself break copyright law by violating an open source code licence. Sounds like Sony is suffering from irony poisoning.

In Part One of my look at Novell last week(Novell faces setbacks in open source strategy 30/11/05), my topic was empty chairs. This week, I'll look at the other side of the story. There are new bodies occupying key seats at Novell these days, a sure sign that the company's bid to regain its prominence in the server software market isn't over yet.

Former Tech Pacific boss, Kerry Baillie, would sometimes refer to the distributor's TechLink website as the Resellers' Bible. This wasn't an idle boast; it gave him a sense of pride that even dealers who didn't frequently source product through Tech Pac would use the site as a pricing yardstick because of the depth and breadth of stock it contained.

This year was the year of the unremarkable - nothing earth shattering happened that would change the face of computing as we know it. It was evolution, not revolution. But that is not a bad thing for the channel - less obsolete inventory, longer lifecycles and falling prices as economies of scale were realised gave resellers a chance to breathe easy.

Several readers wrote in to correct a recent column in which I accidentally reversed my Generation X and Y coordinates: X are the slackers, whereas the Y generation is into self-mutilation. Another reader called me an aging boomer and blamed my generation for Enron and Iraq, among other debacles. Why don't we just call them all - X, Y and Z - Generation Whine?

Are Office Live and Windows Live Microsoft's response to Google? Microsoft's announcement of these new online services was interesting and there are implications for IT folks.

Whatever one might think of the technology that Cisco sells, few would argue against the company's success as a marketing machine. For its competitors, making progress against Cisco has often been as productive as trench warfare in World War I. But that might be changing.

In yet another twist to its suit against IBM, the SCO Group detailed 217 alleged violations of its proprietary Unix code - in a sealed document only the judge can read. I hear the new evidence reveals the name of the insider who leaked the code: Lewis "Sco-oter" Libby. Remember, you read it here first.