Good Week

IBM had another decent time last week in what is turning out to be a rather decent year. With critics lining up to praise its enterprise server strategy, Big Blue agreed a deal to buy DataMirror, its squillionth software acquisition in the past couple of years. It also enjoyed a little schadenfreude as a vote to make Microsoft’s Office OpenXML (OOXML) an ISO standard ended in deadlock. IBM has been an acerbic critic of the OOXML march towards standardisation and even if this is only a Pyrrhic victory, it will go some way towards compensating for other ancient feuds that went Microsoft’s way, such as Windows vs OS/2, OLE vs OpenDoc, MS-DOS vs PC-DOS, and so on and so on…

Bad Week

Harry Potter fans that had planned a wizard experience queuing at midnight to bag the final book had to avoid a pirated edition with each page photographed and uploaded to the web. Security guru Bruce Schneier blogged that he did not “think it was possible to keep the book under wraps … there are simply too many people who must be trusted for the security to hold”. That is a lesson for anybody trying to keep data safe: reduce down the trusted circle. But with Amazon and supermarkets knocking out the book for under £9, what do online readers value most: their eyesight or the price of a round of drinks?

Word of the Week

McDonald’s. “When I think of Linux, I think about fast food. Red Hat is like McDonald’s, it has total market share and dominance. Whereas Suse is like Wendy’s: it has a better product and features and functions but just doesn’t have the market.”

Forrester Research analyst Brad Day