OK - I give in..

Over the last few weeks I've felt that the whole world has been telling me that I need to blog. Today I gave in.

Setting one up has taken longer than it should do. That's in part because Mr Gates has blessed my laptop with XP Service pack 2 and now nothing with scripts in it works with IE.

I've now created more mis-configured blogs on blogger than you can shake a fist at, and I cannot currently delete them. (I'm not worried, though, becase the blogger site tells me that "engineers are aware of the problem" and will be fixing it Real Soon Now).

I finally realised that I should have used Netscape, not IE, to set up the blog acount; as soon as I did everything worked fine.

Has Microsoft shot itself in both feet with XP SP2? It stops so many things from working that even MS diehard fans (not to mention non-technical computer users) will consider migrating to Nestcape or Firefox. All we need now is a similarly disruptive service pack for another widely-used product and Linux will positively fly onto everyone's desktop.

Memo to self - download and install Firefox today, and make it my default browser.

Second memo to self. How hard would it be to migrate all our desktop machines to Linux? Our three production servers already run Linux, and we could use VMWare to keep any non-portable Windows apps available.

There are plenty of signs that Microsoft is really concerned about the threat from Linux. If their comparison of TCO for Linux and Windows doesn't convince you, take a look at their annual filing with the SEC.

Then try the simple test below.

Question: In how many of their main markets does Microsoft indicate that they face significant competition from Open Source Software (OSS) , or software derived from OSS?

Answer: In 5 out of 7, including the client (desktop) software market.

How sad.