Obviously I'm really into this blogging thing

Wealth Redistribution

Taxes are a redistribution of wealth. Any tax on any wealth.
If you live in America then the King… ah I mean Government, takes money from you –that’s your money they take it (in fact they don’t even take it, you send it to them)- to spend on his… their… loyal subjects... er, citizens, in any way they see fit.

They take money that you earned and use it to build roads you may not even drive on, ever, in your whole life. They even use it to build sidewalks. Let’s be frank, if you got wealth, you don’t use sidewalks (well maybe the ones right out side Barney’s or Nieman Marcus, but still).

They also take your money and build schools, to teach kids that might not even be yours, maybe you don’t even have kids or you send your kids to a “better” school, but you are going to pay for the schools the government wants, like it or not. And they, the government not you, gets to say what is taught to the kids in those schools they built with your money, no matter how hieratical it might be and no matter how much of your money they used to build the school or pay the teacher.

They also buy some really cool fast planes. You don’t get to fly them or even get to be near some of them or know where some are or if they even exist. But at least you do get to pay for them. A lot of them actually, maybe more than we need. Though we always seem to need more.

My personal favorite thing about taxes is I get to pay for a big bailout of big bankers who already lost all my little money in the first place. Is that what people mean by wealth re-distribution? Where do I sign up for more of that kind of wealth distribution because I am a fool and I do need to be parted with this wealth that I have laying around in a low interest rate savings account. I read somewhere that my personal share of the $700B is around $35,000. If I write a check for that much can I be excused from the rest of the game?

Google vs. Microsoft in the Messaging Market

The inbox is the workplace.

According to Osterman Research, a firm specializing in market analysis for the messaging and collaboration industry, more than half of typical business information is stored within electronic messaging systems. Sales orders, contracts, and negotiations are all initiated through email. The ethereal inbox then becomes the archival resting place of these crucial documents. That makes email, often considered a casual communication tool, a mission critical business utility.

With the growing trends of collaboration and global integration, enterprise messaging takes on even greater importance. It is the main tool for overcoming time and geography as well as the primary medium for exchanging documents. Computers are the windows through which people and businesses interact and messaging is the core of that interaction.

The enterprise messaging marketplace is a catchall of tools and utilities bringing together corporate email, calendars, instant messaging, shared documents, mobile devices, wikis and a growing list of collaborative widgets. Email is already one of the most important business applications, accounting for up to 25% of productivity according to Osterman Research. Still developers are rolling out new ways of using email and integrating it into every business function. Osterman’s research shows email has a growth rate of roughly 20% per year.

While a feature rich suite is de rigueur for driving new sales and generating buzz, the most poignant tasks for enterprise messaging are the technical challenges of storage and security.

Storage encompasses more than just pure capacity. Both the vital nature and growth of data in messaging systems means backup and restore features must deliver absolute reliability and quick turnarounds. Collaboration drives up the frequency and size of file attachments, which again effects storage. Lastly a data mining strategy is a necessary part of the picture. Enterprises need to keep track of all the imperative and innovative work being done through messaging. Effective archival search and capabilities can recover “lost” data and revel potential leaks of sensitive information.

Add to that the increasing number of regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and even the Patriot Act. All require companies to retain records that may be relevant in later litigation or other compliance. A thorough storage strategy allows companies to readily comply with legal discovery. It will even protect companies from well-meaning or unwitting employees who delete vital records, possibly committing a federal offence and exposing the company to liability. In September 2007 Morgan Stanley was fined $12.5 million for failing to produce emails required in court and to date the firm has paid tens of millions of dollars to settle regulatory charges over “lost” email.

Tied in with storage is security. Nobody wants to backup gigabytes of spam. Administrators expect enterprise systems to eliminate spam before it enters their network. Spam volume keeps growing and new tactics including images and attachments are making the actual messages larger, potentially wasting both corporate bandwidth and storage capacity.

More nefarious challenges such as viruses, spyware, and other attacks also expand in lockstep with email and instant messaging growth. Both are doorways hackers routinely try to exploit to access enterprise networks. A messaging system needs to recognize threats and prevent them from entering the internal network.

Message encryption for outgoing traffic is another security factor. Email is used to contact outside law firms, development partners or overseas vendors and suppliers. Sensitive information needs protection from eavesdropping, tampering, and theft. A robust enterprise messaging system offers rule based or blanket encryption of all data traffic.

Storage and security are major factors that appeal to IT departments. However, if popular features such as mobile access or instant messages are not part of the package, users will circumvent the system to get the features or conveniences they want. A successful messaging product has to bring the full package.

Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino are the dominant providers in the enterprise messaging marketplace. Both offer a full suite of collaborative and robust IT features. Together they hold over 90% of the market, roughly a 60-30 split. Novell’s GroupWise product takes a distant third place in most industry comparisons and is largely considered a legacy patch that will continue to lose market share as companies migrate away from the Netware platform.

Both Exchange Server and Lotus position themselves as complete solutions with lavish collaboration features and add-ons. Microsoft’s SharePoint and Lotus Quickr are platform extensions, which each company pitches as work environments designed to unleash creativity. The advertising and media hype is all about how the nuts and bolts of IT runs quietly behind the scenes while users are free to work, share and innovate. It’s a slightly utopian view but in effect giving people tools that are intuitive, unobtrusive and interoperable wrings more productivity out of every day. That is the very premise of email in the first place. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence in the productivity gains since the 1990s to support the idea.

With sales in excess of $1 billion, Microsoft Exchange Server is the leader in enterprise messaging products. Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela told the on-line publication Mysolutioninfo.com, “more than 80 percent of the Fortune 100 companies deploy Exchange Server as their primary e-mail and calendaring solution.” Much of that market dominance is built upon earlier success with Windows and Office products. Both users and IT departments want their software to work as seamlessly as possible. For most companies that means more Microsoft. Unless a competing product offers significant advantages there is little incentive to switch. And if opinions in the IT trade press are representative, IBM’s offerings are not innovative enough to cause significant migration. In fact Microsoft claims to be taking market share from IBM, a position that is echoed by the research firm Gartner. They predict Exchange Server 2007 will grow Microsoft’s share of the market to 70%, largely at the expense of IBM.

SharePoint is adding to Exchange Server’s dominance and is already one of Microsoft’s fastest growing products. SharePoint moves Microsoft toward what is now being called Unified Communications (UC). The idea brings applications, email, instant messages, voice, fax and video all under one umbrella. Vendors, including Microsoft, still seem to be working out the details but the roadmap points toward an inevitable convergence. You can already access email on your phone and Exchange Server lets you get voice mail in your email.

The new direction brings new players into the market. Suddenly Cisco is a possible partner or competitor. Cisco has used the UC terminology for several years already. Avaya and Nortel both have products they label as UC. With the huge dollar amounts on the table no one wants to be left out, which could lead to better integration altogether.

As vital as email has become, it is also a commodity. For personal use email is largely free. Running water, electricity and telephones all once revolutionized business; email may too recede into the wallpaper as a service.

The next big challenge to Microsoft Exchange server isn’t from a new IBM or Novell release or even an open source Linux application. It’s more likely to come from the likes of Google and the myriad of companies offering outsourced email services. Imagine email not as an Outlook or Notes, but as a new incarnation of the old Ma Bell.

Google already offers many of the features the large software companies are touting. Integrated email and instant messaging, calendar, mapping, robust spam and virus protection, deep archiving, mobility and collaborative applications are all part of the ad supported Google package. Granted the average user of these services is so small that they are not even in the Lotus or Exchange Server market. But there are a handful of companies that target larger enterprises with a similar email “service,” including the critical storage and security features discussed earlier. In fact Google just purchased one of them, Postini, in September 2007. Google has made no secret about its aims to become an information juggernaut. The company claims 100,000 businesses are already using the “Google Apps” communication and collaboration tools and the Postini acquisition adds over 10 million users to that base.

The inbox is the workplace and it’s been a lucrative place for Microsoft. While Exchange Server 2007 may have cemented the company’s lead, it might only be in time to start a new battle, this time against competitors that didn’t even exist when Microsoft started the fight.

Do not eat the orange cheese

The problem with orange cheese isn’t so much in its orangeness. Orange is in fact one of my favorite colors, the brighter the better. The problem is that mass producers use the quality of orangeness to cover up for an overall lack of actual quality.

The research bears this out. Food coloring is marketing, not flavoring, not preservative and not necessary; appearance is everything and perception is reality. The overwhelming speculative history says that orangeness came to be in cheese quite by accident and as a result of bovine diet, with some variation for seasonality. In the days when people just made a product and then put it out there for consumption this was not of a major concern. But with the advent of mass transit and mass commerce it becomes a factor and suddenly the world is a wash with “me-too” orange tinted cheeses that taste like nothing more than sub-par dairy coagulant.

The fact is orangeness in cheese today is all about orange and not cheese. It’s orange because its made that way, because someone in the marketing department felt it should be; not because of some natural chemical reaction of cow, grass and farmer. In fact the likelihood of actual orange cheeses ever being available is highly unlikely. The original real orangeness was due to beta-carotene levels in the milk, which got there from the grass that cows ate. Note cows ate grass. That’s another tragedy. For some reason cows don’t eat grass anymore. Now we feed them corn and other ground up cows. I’m not sure why that is but I imagine that is got something to do with why they use a synthetic white compound in TV ads instead of real milk. Reality is perception but just what the heck are we all perceiving?

It’s all further proof that bad ideas gain traction just as well as good ones. And bad ideas need to be called out and berated for what they are. It’s a bad idea to make cheese orange. It’s also a bad idea to market a substance that is so corrosive in its pure form that it can melt pavement, especially when your major market is kids. I call that disgusting and immoral. You might call it cola. I’m not willing to call it just a difference of opinion.

Take cigarettes for example. Smoking is not a life style “choice.” It’s a dumb idea that is followed up with a narcotic like addiction and further punished with emphysema, lung cancer and other not-good stuff. This seem like it should be obvious. Most people who die in a fire die from smoke, not fire. But lots of people still smoke. Have they been fooled or are they just fools. One can never tell.

Purveyance of orange cheese may not be on the same scale as pushing dope on babies, but it is a slippery slope. Acceptance of such basic unrealities leads directly to the issuances of new even more ridiculous concepts. Like for instance transforming countries that were once ruled by arrogant and brutal dictators, who were themselves proceeded by various oppressive monarchies and occasional chaos, into modern beacons of uncorrupted democracy by way of superior firepower.

Bad ideas are bad ideas. Do not eat the orange cheese.

Why you don't know cheese

It’s not so much that I grew up in luxury and need to lord that above everyone else, silver spoon rammed up my nose and all that. Actually it is just the opposite. I grew up in dirt.

“You could grow carrots in there,” my Mom used to say looking at my fingernails. As I remember it I spent every summer sitting in a pile of dirt. That was my first canvas. The worlds I built there were rich with imagination and just enough ignorance about what is possible. It was a ‘Huck Finn’ childhood, which I have yet to really grow out of and as I look out on your planet today, mostly it doesn’t measure up. And so I have become a hopeless snob.

“Oh” you say, “tough break, you had a happy childhood, get over it.”

But see when you taste something for the very first time, no matter how good or bad it is, that becomes your base line for understanding a thing, be it maple syrup, love or art. You can’t help but compare all subsequent renditions to that first thing. That’s part of why Hollywood sequels are always so bad. It’s not just that they aren’t very good, but in comparison to the original they are even worse.

Lets take cheese for example, because really this is the root of all-evil, I mean the whole problem. My earliest impression of cheese is Cabot Sharp Cheddar. To me this is cheese at its core, the very essence of cheese. So when you hand me some bright orange block of pasteurized dairy product and try to pass it off as “cheese,” as “cheddar cheese” no less, well what kind of reaction do you expect; I scoff. That simply does not even approach my baseline experience of cheese. And yet there are whole companies organized around the buying and selling, packaging and pushing, of this less-than-cheese; are these people innocently misinformed or is there a deeper sort of malice here? Given the history of most of humanity, crusades, ethnic cleansing and the sort, I’m not inclined to think that this is just a simple misunderstanding. Tasteless blocks of dairy coagulant are NOT cheese. I can’t belabor this enough. If you are eating such non-cheese and finding satisfaction its only because you have been successfully duped by slick marketing and a lack of proximity to real cheese. So stop.

And that’s when my Mom would say, “stop being such a snob.” What? It’s ok to let this sham go on? We put a stop to Nixon and his Watergate nonsense. The Church finally had to owe up to that pedophile predicament, so why must we continue to perpetuate false cheese upon the people. Look, a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity. It’s a moral slippery slope. First not-cheese is OK, then not-justice.

And don’t even get me started about not-ice cream.

One

Among the many things I will be writing about are why I am right. Naturally that leads to "and you're wrong," but I'm becoming a little less inflexible in my old age. You may not be wrong, but that doesn't make me any less right. And that is essentially why this is the snob report. I recognize that I hold my own ideas about the universe in much higher esteem than anybody else's, but in review I find I'm not wrong. That whole "bell bottom" thing is just an example.

snob: a person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field.
( Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006).

Yep, it's that accurate.