Bad riff
The best thing about Linux for most of us is that it applies a lot of pressure to Microsoft to play nice (as described in this CNet piece). Nothing like competition to wake people up, even if it is mostly potential competition right now.
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The best thing about Linux for most of us is that it applies a lot of pressure to Microsoft to play nice (as described in this CNet piece). Nothing like competition to wake people up, even if it is mostly potential competition right now.
An interesting article on human capital written by Britton Manasco makes some good points. He mentions five dimensions of good human capital management:
All great things that taste great together. The article doesn't talk too much about the dynamics of the situation. It is very interesting to juxtapose the general cost-cutting metality that surrounds most businesses today with these ideals. When times get tough, these five are often the first to be shown the door.
NewsFactor has a brief analysis on Windows vs. Linux that hits most of the valid points. One point that I think is undersold is the difference in user experience between Windows and Linux. Microsoft has enough marketshare and longevity for there to be quite a bit of human capital build up around the world on operating (and administering) Windows. Displacing this human capital is going to take a distruptive kind of jolt. Just because you come up with a better interface doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door. Is the QWERTY keyboard the best keyboard design? Just looking at a side-by-side comparison of the two operating systems does not account for the dynamics required to create a change in inertia.
Seth Grimes wrote an interesting article in Intelligent Enterprise on advanced statistical techniques in business performance management (BPM). Interestingly, he makes the claim that the move to simplicity (slice-and-dice) has diluted the analytic capabilities of the many BI platforms. I'm extremely surprised that the mainstream BI products don't offer time-series and non-linear models as part of their basic statistical tools.
Although people believe that you need to have a specialist on staff to handle these kinds of models, I don't believe that to be the case. Although you would want help with very complex situations, there are well understood models with tried and true practices that can be used in many instances by any reasonably numerate person if the software made it simple. Possibly, as Mr. Grimes suggests, they aren't included because business users don't know to ask or are intimidated by them. A usable facade on sophisticated techniques would be an excellent entre into the BI market.
Recently, in Ralph Kimball's column in Intelligent Enterprise, he wrote about the potential of RFID and smart dust (computers and sensors in very, very small packages) to significantly alter the face of data warehousing because of the sheer quantity of information collected and the introduction of many new dimensions for analysis. He believes that we will be able collect 10 to 100 times more data than is the current practice and want to analyze this in a myriad of new ways.
I'm wondering if this explosion of information being collected in the retail and consumer goods sector will inspire some of the practices from manufacturing to become more widespread in data warehousing? Large industrial plants already have tens of thousands of sensors collecting data from the processes they are monitoring. This data is often recorded in a process historian (like the one provided by OSIsoft) and is compressed in a way that eliminates the many redundant readings that are provided by a process that is stable. These systems allow the collection of tremendous amounts of data, without having to store all of the non-important values.
Maybe the individual readings from RFID tags will provide more entropy and be less subject to compression? I'm not sure but it stands to reason that a pallet of razor blades is going to all go through the same state changes at the same time in a predictable fashion in most cases. This predictability of the process is a reduction in the information conveyed by each individual reading and might be subject to compression. Anyway, it seems like an interesting avenue of pursuit for data warehousing vendors.
Although the comparison to the famous "Dewey Wins" head line is silly, this commentary by Charles Cooper on News.com is interesting. He makes a very good point that the recession came at just the right time for Microsoft. With a ton of cash and the ability to maintain revenues through a strong (some would say monopolistic) market position, Microsoft was able to get stronger in the last two years.
Although Linux is a threat, Microsoft is taking it seriously. The bigger threat is probably posed by the end of the PC era, but Microsoft is trying to cover their bases on that end as well. As hard as it is to believe, I think in 20 years, Microsoft will be a bigger influence on the daily lives of people than it is today. They are smart, agressive and they have tons of money.