Unified Communications: Opinions

As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.

With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due Monday at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Every week, I feel like I'm discovering new ways for companies to reduce the amount of paper and ink they use each day -- not to mention the amount they spend shipping pieces of paper hither and yon for signing, processing, and filing (by no means a trivial cost, either, considering that a single 6 oz. large envelope shipped via USPS Express can cost around US$19.50 or $4.80 if it's sent Priority).

I did it yesterday. Not that I was trying, mind you -- honestly, I wasn't. I did, however, predict it would happen, so I'm going to take this opportunity to gloat about that.

I recently visited the Greek island of Santorini. The island is best known as a sunny destination for jet-setting holiday makers who lounge in idyllic hotel rooms perched on the sides of steep and majestic cliffs. But historians, geologists and archaeologists know Santorini as the site of one of the most horrible disasters in human history.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in every industry, if you define "interesting" as the kind of thing that a practitioner of the space will jump for joy at the prospect of reading.

You can't simply open a new Web site, sit back, and expect to welcome a horde of visitors showing up at your virtual storefront. If you want your online business to be successful, you must promote your site.

Last week I started to enumerate my phone numbers and I wound up discussing Google's GrandCentral telephony service with considerable enthusiasm. While some people, such as reader and fellow Twitterer Allen Clarkson, are big fans, not everyone is quite as enthusiastic.

Being a pundit, like being in love, means never having to say you're sorry, right? Wrong. Besides, that's got to be one of the dumbest lines in history -- from what I can tell, loving someone means acknowledging your mistakes early and often, and making reparations as best you can.

Forget the Super Bowl. Ignore the presidential primaries. For network geeks, the really big news recently was the cable outages in the Mediterranean, which disrupted Internet connections to Europe and the Middle East. The outages have raised a host of questions about the vulnerability of the Internet and the action plans enterprises should have in place to protect themselves from the consequences. Here are some frequently asked questions -- and the answers.

We all realize that technology can change human behavior. If you don't quite know what I mean, just ask television network executives who have seen the erosion of their audience and ad dollars as more and more people log on to the Web for information and entertainment.