Blue Skies: Microsoft Is Spending A Bundle

Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly

("Blue Skies," by Irving Berlin)

Wow, did you hear the latest greatest news from the Microsoft Public Relations machine?

Well, if you're a steady reader of ServerPipeline, you saw the headline: Microsoft intends to spend 40 Billion (that's with a "B") dollars on research and development.

I'm not sweating the small stuff, but I was glad to read on that even Bill can't shake loose that much cash in one year. The spending is to be done during the next six years.

Where is the bulk of the research to be done you ask? On seamless computing. "The work we're doing at Microsoft is building software delivering on a dream of seamless computing where your information is there when you want it and all systems are connected together with no manual effort." Or so our friend Bill (no, not that Bill) thinks.I have two questions. First, do we really know what data we want, and know when we want it, so that it will be where it should be when we figured out why and what, as opposed to where we wanted it to be?

I don't know about you, but most days, I'm not even sure what day it is, where I will be going and more importantly why I'm going there. As far as business systems go, more information is not necessarily a good thing. There is such a concept as information overload; I sure know about e-mail overload, phone overload and pressure overload.

Information where I want it and when, wow, now that's magical!

The second question is even deeper. How many of those 40,000,000,000 dollars (man, a billion is a lot of zeros) will be spent on fixing the bugs in the products that Microsoft has already released?

Forty Billion dollars. Just imagine what you could do with that much money.0