Microsoft has been working hard to market its OneCare AV (or what ever its called) product of recent times... but even they had to admit that things haven't been travelling well for them.

I arranged my Cebit (Sydney - May 2007) ticket the other day...  Over the past few years I have made a habit of dropping in on the CeBit exhibition as its a good place to get ideas and a bit of inspiration.  Just wandering around looking at products and talking to exhibitors is quite interesting... I usually manage to fill a few hours.  This year, CeBit features an expanded Open Source mini exhibition which in its 2nd year is proving popular.  I didn't actually end up getting down to CeBit last year so didn't get to see the response first hand to the Open Source side of things so I'm keen to see what happens this year.  Early bird registrations are available until March 15th so I would recommend a visit to www.CeBit.com.au real soon.

Those of us who were remember playing with a product from SCO called "Merge" back in the late 90s will remember its ability to run Microsoft Windows in a virtual machine environment and display application windows in the same layer as Xwindows.  This was really cool at the time though the hardware performance limitations of the day meant that it was not a particulalrly viable option for most people (umm actually the price of Merge made it pretty unattaractive too!).

I'm a late comer to the world of PDAs...

In fact I was a late comer to laptops as well... and PC's ...

Following on from my thoughts on virtualisation last week, I came across this article today.  Worth a read. 

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=650015706&eid=-219

I've been doing a lot with virtualisation lately....

Collaboration seems to be a big issue these days....

I've got a number of clients addressing this issue at the moment... they just wnat the basics:

• Calendaring
• Task Managerment
• Contacts 
  

A couple are also keen for a bit of Document Management.

 A common thread with all of them is that they aren't interested in forking out for Microsoft Exchange... and they all come from the same bit of traditional business common sense: "If it doesn't make more money than it costs... don't do it".  As a GM at a 300 user site said to me a couple of days ago, 98% of his staff work just as efficiently with a $10 diary as they will with $200K worth of collaboration software.  Can't agree more!