...Otherwise you just get an obscure "Error 400" and will sit there like me scratching your head thinking it's a broken link. Heaven forbid that people just download public content anonymously.. sigh!

The challenge for alternatives to Office is clear: Break customer inertia. We all know the potential ROI case. Alternatives are largely free vs. paying Microsoft for Office. However, customers generally like Office and have no tolerance for that PowerPoint document that may not be formatted correctly with an alternative.

I'll never understand it. I could have a dozen top men from Big Blue explain it to me for hours on end, and I still won't completely get why IBM keeps shuffling people in and out of Lotus Software's general manager position. I know IBM stands for "I've Been Moved" and that executive shuffling is the norm for the company. But for crucial leadership positions, there needs to be some stability.

And yet, IBM continues its predictable pattern of rotating executives in and out of Lotus after a couple of years. Just this week at Lotusphere 2010, IBM annoited a new head of Lotus, the fifth general manager in less than 10 years, causing Lotus to become a rudderless subsidiary with no true identity or direction. It's gone on for the last decade, and it's gone on long enough.

In the meantime, we now understand exactly why it was that US regulator The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found it so difficult to detect Bernie Madoff's fraud - several SEC staff were apparently spending their time trying to use the regulator's computers to access porn sites instead of helping to combat crime.

. . . Our center is about 10,000 square feet, and it's only half full. But we run a lot of machines - about 4,000 quad-core HP blades, 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage. It all has to be packed together for performance, and we use multiple 10 gigabyte links to connect the gear.