too much hot air and too strong a sentiment of "alarm!"

Well, this guy probably wouldn't have gotten Slashdotted if he wrote a nice, meek review article! For all I know his business is a one-person shop and this article might have drawn enough attention to double his list of paying customers!

A friend sent me this article a week or so ago after seeing it on /. and I read it all the way through. It certainly seems small-business and VAR-oriented and is certainly also biased and opinionated, but (and pehaps this is just because some of his biases align with mine) I thought it wasn' t a half-bad review of the overall situation WRT small-business servers, desktops and relevant decisions. There were some minor spots where I thought his bias came close to being wrong on facts, say:

"Short battery life is the bane of devices that approach full Windows PC function, and also plagues smaller PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) devices running Microsoft's Pocket PC version of Windows."

I mean, short battery life doesn't plague my Zaurus, too? *Overall* though, alarmist as some of it seems, I don't see where he is way out of line on facts or interpretation. *Are* there any Windows ISVs left other than Intuit and Symantec? Does Microsoft make serious money on anything other than Office and Windows? (Mice, maybe??) What was MSFT's motive for Licensing v6 and how should businesses react to it? Will future MSFT OS and architecture (Longhorn and .NET) force customers to make a "'Yer either fer us of agin us!" choice? -- attempt to lock customers in to a Microsoft-centric computing environment?

What I would say is that when it comes to the MSFT-related parts of his opinionated piece, history backs this gent up and I am waiting for someone to pick substantive bones with the bases of his arguments.