He, like others in this genre — David Allen, Merlin Mann, the Four Hour Work Week guy, etc. — is enamored of this mystical idea of “Inbox Zero,” a pure land of bliss where every email is instantly answered and properly dealt with.

For a long time I accepted this as True and the Right Thing and felt bad that I always have thousands of emails in my inbox.

But, you know what?  They’re wrong: Inbox Zero is a pernicious, dangerous idea that creates more suffering than it relieves. It doesn’t conform to reality and it represents an outdated simplistic idea of what email is. My approach — which I suspect is your approach too unless you are either autistic or writing a book about productivity pr0n — is best described as Infinite Inbox.

That is, rather than thinking of my email inbox like a physical mailbox, which needs to be emptied daily, I think of it more like a newswire or some other kind of news feed. It just scrolls along, a never-ending stream of email.  My ‘inbox’  is a window into the stream, not a box that gets filled up emails.

Just in the same way that I don’t bother acting on most items in the AP wire or my Facebook updates page, so too I don’t bother acting on the majority of the email that comes streaming through. If I did, I’d go crazy; I have a family that needs my time, an old house to maintain, beer to drink.

So I do what all normal people do; we fish in the stream of the Infinite Inbox. I’ll read email from my boss and close colleagues or if the subject line seems important, but I don’t sweat emails I don’t read. They’re there anyway to be searched.

I used to maintain elaborate folders of email sorted by project and topic but I eventually noticed that I never looked inside of those folders. The way we find information, on the Internet or in our email, is by searching. If I’m on a conference call and someone refers to a spreadsheet they sent, I search for their name, sort by date and attachment and pull it up.  It takes no time and I didn’t waste any time earlier trying to decide what to do with it. I don’t mark messages with little flags or colors or tags or whatever.  If I’m really worried about it, I’ll print it out and put it on my desk so I don’t forget it.  Gasp!  That’s what people actually do.

There’s all kinds of flaws to this system and we really need smarter email assistants to sort and prioritize our email streams but Infinite Inbox is the way things are, unlike Inbox Zero which is for most of us an impossible and ultimately frustrating ideal.

Sometimes I feel the need to view subsets of my email stream, so I have views for “this week’s mail” and “messages addressed only to me” and other filters. But the idea that I could have, or even want, no messages at all in my inbox seems a little silly to me.

I guess I could drag everything into an archive folder to achieve that, but why bother?  There’s always going to be email piling up and the world continues to revolve on its axis.  When I come back from (unplugged) vacations, I’m always surprised by the twin observations of how much email I have piled up and how little has really happened; now I just spend less time worrying about keeping my inbox at zero and accept that it, like the world, is boundless.

This is good for nerds who want to impress their girlfriends* with portable versions of SLES on a USB stick.

It’s better for ISVs (independent software vendors) who want to create appliance versions of their applications

But, I think, it’s best for corporate IT shops that are looking to create a standard build environment for their technology infrastructure.  In Novell’s consulting organization, we have a popular core build [.pdf] offering, which does much the same thing, except with requirements gathering, security reviews, documentation, and all that complicated enterprise-y stuff.  Remember that a distribution is a kind of application marketplace, with more applications than you’ll ever need or want.  Enterprise IT usually wants less, if only for manageability and security concerns, which is why customers routinely hire Novell consulting to come and create custom versions of the distribution for them.

If they want to skip all that, this tool (screencast) allows them to create their own core builds and what we call ‘personalities’ on top of the core build — a personality for a database server will be different than a personality for a web server, for example, but the core build underneath will be the same.

Corporate IT teams can use it at the end of a regular build process to create blessed workloads consisting of “JeOS” (just enough operating system) + personality + custom or packaged applications.  These can be XML config files, .iso images, VMs, or AMIs for deployment to Amazon’s cloud services.  The deployment is just a checkbox option; pretty cool.

*  (You must be new here.)

I have two email accounts, one personal and one for work, and they are both, each in their own way, profoundly broken.  Like most people, I actually have a bunch of email addresses, but they’re logically separated into work and personal.  I use a combination of Gmail and Thunderbird for my personal mail, and Groupwise for my work mail.

I try to manage my personal account so that at least occasionally I get to the mythical zero inbox, but my corporate account with 3,000 messages in it is just a stream that flows by with me on the river bank with a pathetic net trying to catch the most important bits roaring by.  Right at this moment I have 19 emails open on my desktop, awaiting action.

I think that people who don’t work in a corporate environment don’t understand the central role that corporate email systems (Outlook/Exchange, Notes, or Novell’s own Groupwise) play in the lives of their inmates users.  Meetings are scheduled, documents are exchanged, decisions are made, and long-running debates are all handled exclusively within these email systems.  I know that the kids and the Koreans don’t use email any more, but for large organizations, email is practically the system of record for most purposes.  (Xobni Insight for Outlook is supposed to be good, but I don’t have any personal experience with it.)

On the personal, non-corporate side, there have been many runs taken at the Problem of Email.  Notably, there was the  Chandler fiasco; more recent failures were the very nice Seek extension for Thunderbird from the Simile project at MIT, the short-lived “I Want Sandy” email assistant, and myriad universal inbox solutions.

Sandy’s sister, cc:Betty, looks promising, and Thunderbird fork called Postbox has garnered some praise.  I’ve been using the version 3 beta of Thunderbird and I really like it — so much so that I’ve moved back to using a client after switching away for the charms of Gmail.

I think  Google’s Gmail was the first real innovation in email in quite a long time.  For me, the progression goes: mail –> elm –> Eudora –> Thunderbird –> Gmail.  And now, Gmail+Thunderbird.   I don’t like everything about Gmail; the conversation view still baffles me, I don’t really use tagging effectively, I can’t stand not being able to sort by sender, and I don’t understand how it treats deleted and archived messages.  But abandoning the complex folder structure I’d developed over the years was really liberating once I trusted the system.  If there’s going to be real on-going innovation in email, I wouldn’t bet against Google and Gmail Labs.

There’s an excellent discussion of the Problem of Email in the comments to an article by Alastair Croll on GigaOM entitled “Why Email Clients Need to Change.”  The article is worth reading but the discussion is outstanding.

Of the new entrants trying to solve the (personal, non-corporate) Problem of Email, the best one I’ve seen is OtherInbox.  It works with your existing IMAP email to categorize and sort your messages.  It in effect applies preset filters to your messages and seems to be directed at people who have lots of social media updates in their in-box — it groups Facebook messages, for instance.  But it points the way forward, I think, by recognizing that there are actually several distinctive kinds of messages in your inbox, each of which can be dealt with in a different but standard way.

What really got me thinking was, as usual, a visual representation of data; this time, of emails in Croll’s inbox, analyzed using the excellent mail-trends tool.

After all, most email is (relatively)  structured text; Croll had a lot of Twitter traffic in his in-box, but that doesn’t seem to me to be an especially mainstream case.  But it’s one of many, viz.:

Purchases

This is a little workflow; you buy something, the vendor sends you a confirmation.  Then when the order ships, they send you a tracking number.  You need to make sure that the order was correct in the first place and then, perphaps after giving it a relevant name (”new sandals” instead of LL Bean Order #2342423) you want the workflow to keep track of it, perhaps in a calendar view, and update you on its status and throw a flag after a certain period if you haven’t received it.  After acknowledging receipt in the workflow, this thread should be silently archived and disappear from view.  It would be in the interest of, say, Amazon, to offer easy hooks to do this.

Mailing Lists

These have a different behavior than order tracking; they’re best put into a bulletin board view by themselves, with some simple, configurable, rules: keep them in a threaded discussion for two weeks unless I take some other action on them.  Then they can silently fall off the end of the thread, unless they’re subscription or administrative messages, which ought to be archived.

Reminders/Alerts

These are more important and should appear in some insistent form, perhaps in some status bar like Growl — “meeting in ten minutes”, “on a conference call”, “on a call” — and/or on a calendar view.  Then, after the time of the appointment has passed, it should automagically disappear.  No threaded discussion view, no workflow.  But wouldn’t it be nice if your calendar automatically updated your status?

Non-spam ads (opt-in vendor mail)

Spam is at this point a solved problem; I’m thinking instead here of emails from the local minor league hockey team advertising kids’ day or a deal from my garden supply store that I want to know about.  I would set up a rule for these to appear in my main stream but automatically disappear after a day or two.  Linking to the opt-out function as a check box or something would be fantastic.  The hive mind would help a lot here.

Account Info

This category requires special handling; I’d like to see anything with username or password information automatically encrypted and stored.  This function alone would be a major win in my book.

Personal Mail

Anything from a recognized (white-list) sender, especially if it is single-recipient, should go to the top of the stream.  It would be nice to apply GTD-style rules as an option.

Travel

This is a big one for me; I use Tripit to manage my travel itineraries, and I think it’s invaluable.  I email Tripit my hotel reservation and my flight information and it puts it together for me; I’d like my email system to do something similar.  After all, Delta’s itineraries are nothing more than structured text waiting to be parsed into a calendar, status, and archive system.  (This is the classic semantic web use case.)

Other

For me, Twitter and Facebook updates aren’t a big deal, but they seem to be important to some — I can imagine that there are lots of other categories that aren’t relevant to me but are everyday hassles for others.

Google’s “What we learned from a million businesses in the cloud”

Gomez offers website monitoring services.

Google Apps Premier Edition Service Level Agreement

Google’s “We feel your pain and we’re sorry” apology

I recently talked to a friend about building out their data center and my immediate response was, “Why on earth would you want to build a data center?”  Of course, there are still good reasons but there are fewer and fewer of them each day.

One of the advantages of rolling your own physical data center is that you get to establish relationships with lovely vendors, like Novell.  You set up support agreements and we charge you for them; if something breaks, we’ll be on the phone or in person helping you fix it.  There’s different levels of this kind of break/fix support: we can put teams of engineers full-time at your data centers around the world, or we can give you a part-time person that you share with a half-dozen other customers.  That way, they know what’s going on in your specific environment and you have a person you rely on rather than some phone bank; sharing the resource, obviously, is cheaper.  There’s also off-site (remote) options with access to a named engineer who’s only available by phone, or direct access to specialists (L2 or backline in the jargon).  And so on down the list to regular 24×7 phone support; it’s a full menu.

I think Novell has very, very good support.  But what does Amazon’s support look like?

They offer Premium Support in addition to forums, FAQs, and a dashboard.  There are two levels of premium support  Gold gives you 24×7 phone support, so it’s really the only option for serious enterprise-class customers.  (Silver gives you 12×5 access to their trouble-ticketing system.)  But Gold really only gives you what is termed in the industry “Level 1″ support; the frontline help desk personnel who are charged with answering the majority of (sometimes inane) questions.  If they determine that you’ve got a real problem that is beyond their abilities, you get ‘escalated’ to Level 2, a level populated by real nerds with specialized skills in particular technologies.  Level 1 does the triage, handles the first aid, and sends hard cases to specialists.  (Level 3, then, does bug fixes to the code to solve problems that aren’t resolved in L1/L2.  There is no Level 4, and sometimes the L1/L2/L3 distinctions get blurry; our L2 teams, for example, often write code that designated “L3″ teams review and approve.)

So Amazon’s support at the moment is limited to what I would consider the most basic break/fix offering, even at their Gold level.  At $4,800/yr. (and up) with no annual contract, though, it’s cheap by enterprise standards, and is available for all of their software services.

But in the world of software (and software as a service) support, there’s a distinction between response and resolution.  The Amazon Gold support is a response-time service level.  That is, they commit to responding to your request in a specified time.  They do not commit to resolving that issue in a specified time.  Their response time service levels are one hour for high severity service requests with Gold support; normal is one business day.  (At least, I think that’s right — the terms are a bit unclear; I don’t understand the difference between what they call “high severity” and “urgent.”)

More later.

Everyone who runs a large data center is today faced with the same set of interconnected environmental problems; space, power, and heating/cooling. And these are environmental not just in the sense of tree-hugging but also in a straightforward practical sense: there is no more space, there is no more power, there is too much heat and not enough cooling. These problems were the domain of junior people a few years ago, worrying about where, physically, to locate all the new Windows boxes. Then it was middle managers trying to sort out power and HVAC issues: “If we deploy a new phone system in our building we won’t have enough power to do any upgrades in the data center,” that sort of thing. Now environmental issues are front-and-center for senior IT management and if you’re a “red-shift” kind of company, for senior corporate leadership too.

You can cloak it if you want to in green terms but businesses are faced with real operational issues that they need to address regardless of their perspective on global warming or riverine dolphins.

Alongside these environmental issues, data centers are also facing a crisis of manageability. A large enterprise data center is a staggeringly complex thing, too complicated. Also, if the truth be told, most of them are not that well run; would you expect, for example, that an auto parts distributor would have great technology management skills? No, of course not, and the fact is that they probably wouldn’t want to spend the money to acquire that talent and technology even in they could; their differentiation, the competitive advantage of their business, lies elsewhere. So they have a complicated, and sub-optimized, technology infrastructure.

The answer to all of these problems — Monday edition — supposedly lies in virtualization. Novell gets brought into these conversations because inevitably data center managers have a roadmap that looks something like this:

1. Simplify and Standardize

The operations guys, who run the apps once they’re written, are finally getting the teeth to enforce common standards on the development side of the house. This is a political process as much as anything else, but it’s as hard as any technical issue, something that nerds are woefully bad at understanding.

What are the preferred options for operating systems? For databases? For Java platforms? For development languages? And so forth. The answers don’t matter so much as the fact that there are only one or two of them. Some shops use the model of Legacy/Supported/Preferred/Emerging, where Legacy is bad, Supported is headed to Legacy, and Emerging is headed to Preferred. So, for example you might say that Oracle and SQLServer are your preferred databases, while DB2 is supported (reluctantly) for a particular reason. Sybase, let’s say, is around still in the environment but it’s Legacy and thus unsupported: if you have problems with it, don’t come crying to Ops about it. Emerging would be MySQL and that sound you heard after the Sun acquisition was ten thousand infrastructure architects moving MySQL from the Emerging category to Preferred.

One of the key elements here is Linux. Data centers in the future are going to run Windows, in some form or another, and Linux. That’s it. Now, that’s going to take a long time, since we know that IT is conservative, and there will still be Solaris and VMS and so on in the data center of the future, but that’s not where the action is. It’s going to be Linux and Windows. But, as we’ll see, that may not make so much of a difference.

2. Consolidate and Virtualize

So once we’ve started to enforce rules on the heterogeneous chaos, we can begin to take advantage of that consistency. We’ve probably already got a SAN and perhaps an Oracle RAC environment (in addition to all those single instance databases), so the idea of virtualized pools of IT resources is not a new idea to our customers out in the business units. And it isn’t a new idea for sure for the mainframe guys, who are laughing their asses off, inside of their oxygen tents.

So now we start to consolidate servers through virtualization, inevitably beginning with the development and testing environments. You give the developers standard virtual machines to work on and then, magically, they’re going to migrate — after proper testing, mind you, we do have our dignity — into virtual production environments. At the same time, there is more likely than not a server consolidation project going on to move single servers into virtualized environments. Ten:1 or even 20:1 is common in production environments.

All that virtualization creates management headaches of its own; for infrastructure software vendors like Novell, the game is going to play out not at the level of the hypervisor — which is going to commodity status before reaching general availability — but at the level of the management tools. That’s what people will pay for.

Virtualization is not as easy as I’m making it out here; properly configuring hardware, for instance, is not yet straightforward and the performance hits on mis-configured hardware can be significant. Memory is king in the hardware for virtualization, and blades don’t seem to cut it because of their I/O and other physical constraints, so lots of shops looking at virtualization are re-thinking their blade investments that are just a few years old.

Even if you get that and the management of virtualization under control, you still have the basic architectural design of your virtualized data center to consider: is every application going to run its own virtualized stack? What about single apps on single physical servers? Are you still going to incur the hypervisor tax in that situation? Is the management & DR benefit worth it? And I’m ignoring the desktop side of things here but that is an other, huge, mess that you could virtualize.

3. Cloudify (? Cloudize? Cloudit?)

Let’s say that you’ve done all this and you’ve got a few standard platforms (Windows, database, Java, web server/LAMP, raw C++ for super-special stuff) that you’re supporting in your Preferred environment, plus some Supported and Legacy stuff that’s still lying around. For the most part, you’ve broken the tight linkage between the physical resources — the disks and the CPUs — and the abstract/digital ones, which means that you can now start to think about moving them around. Hedge funds might not want to put their algorithmic trading systems too far from Wall Street, but their HR systems don’t really need expensive Manhattan real estate, do they?

This also points to the fact that these infrastructure services are utility-like, as Nicholas Carr described in his readable The Big Switch. Java developers really should not care what operating system, or what hardware platform, or what storage system is running in the background. (They also shouldn’t care whether it’s WebLogic or WebSphere or JBoss but the fact that they do is another story.) You don’t care what operating system Google, or Bank of America’s website, or this blog, is using, do you?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard about corporate developers that have used Amazon’s pay-by-the sip service to develop apps without having to go through the laborious approvals process for infrastructure, and then the business sponsors of the application have said to just leave it there rather than moving it back ‘inside.’ But, as Nygard writes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon’s EC2 service — or EMC’s or Sun’s or Dell’s… — is going to suck up all of these virtualized enterprise machines, although that is one option. Another option is that enterprises are going to build their own clouds and host their platforms themselves. Again, the issues are not so much technical as political: no less real, just different.

The existence of the pay-by-the-sip services is, however, going to cast a harsh light on the value of corporate IT services. The business owners will be able to see, exactly, how much more they’re paying for supposedly secure inside-the-firewall services compared with out-in-the-wild services. And by services I mean computing/storage/etc.

4. Ongoing

So where is this all going? In a characteristically insightful piece, Tim Bray surveys the landscape and sees change all around — in programming languages, databases, desktops, and elsewhere. For instance, if you’re looking for the new Emerging-category database, Bray suggests Apache CouchDB, Amazon’s SimpleDB or Google’s BigTable. I don’t know if that’s right or not but he’s smarter than me. And this is what he has to say about the strategies to make money from all of these observations:

Business Models · Servers, they’re easy to understand. Blue-suited salesmen sell them to CIOs a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth at a time, they get loaded into data centers where they suck up too much power and HVAC.

Well, unless you’re gonna do your storage and compute and load-balancing and so on out in the cloud. Are you? The CIOs and data-center guys are wrestling this problem to the ground right now.

And as for software, used to be you shipped binaries on magnetic media and charged ’em a right-to-use license. Nope, nowadays it’s open-source and they download it for free and you charge them a support contract. Nope, that was last century; maybe the software’s all going to be out there in the cloud and you never download anything, just pay to use what’s there.

Personally, I don’t think any of those models are actually going to go away. But which works best where? The market’s working that out, right now.

For now, that seems to be just about the right answer to me.

I spoke recently with a guy worked at a VMS help desk twenty five years ago; he said that he’d recently run into some old colleagues from that time and asked them what they were doing. They said they were doing the same thing, VMS support, and that the team had pretty much stayed the same size, a couple of dozen people. IBM supposedly still has their own VMS help desk for their internal users. (You will recall that VMS is an old DEC operating system, an ancient enemy of IBM’s, so this is an admission not only that they use a competitor’s operating system but also, more to the point, that they can’t get off of it.)

My first consulting gig was at DEC, trying to get the remaining VAX/VMS customers to move over to VMS on Alpha. The challenge then, as now, was the lack of a business need to move: if payroll runs fine on their VAX, why on earth should they touch it, and risk missing payroll one week? I’d be willing to bet that some of those customers that I talked to then are still using their old VAX boxes.

Plus, it has to be said, that there’s a real issue with IT skills; a lot of people, as you would expect, are comfortable with what they know and deeply uncomfortable with the unknown. Any change represents a move into the unknown, where their skills and abilities may be less (or more, but different) than they are today.

At a current client of mine, their users are dependent on Kermit (remember that?) running on fully-fledged Windows PCs to telnet into a Unix (soon to be Linux) box. Why are they using Kermit instead of, say, Putty? Or Windows instead of a thin client? Or telnet instead of ssl? Because that’s what they’ve always done, that’s what their customers are used to, and that’s what they’re used to. Maybe they could change, but they’re not going to.

One factor, though, driving change within corporate IT is their users. Outside of Sun’s “redshift” customers (those using IT for competitive advantage — oil exploration, or web-based businesses, e.g.), most corporate IT departments are being directed from above to cut costs, not innovate. This dovetails nicely with the conservative instinct. But there is some evidence that people within large enterprises are simply bypassing their IT departments to get things done.

Forrester has a new report out entitled, “Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism” which argues that individuals are now driving technology adoption within enterprises. Much like the growth of personal computers in the 1980s, people are using new software tools, especially web-based tools, to do their jobs, regardless of what the IT department thinks of it. Read Write Web has a good piece, based on the Forrester report, that looks at the issue and discusses concerns around security, quality of service, and information silos.

There’s also an interesting Wall Street Journal interview with the CIO of Google, Douglas Merrill, who basically trusts his users to do the right thing and lets them manage their own ‘endpoints’ (PCs, laptops, mobile devices — things that connect to the network.)

WSJ: What’s driving the “consumerization” of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?

Mr. Merrill: Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That’s not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software]. The biggest thing to ask is, “When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?”

See also the discussion of this piece on Slashdot, the house organ of the sys admin.

All of this is forward-looking because today, enterprise web 2.0 is in its infancy. In the Forrester study, looking only at enterprise IT people who recognized the terms (I wonder how many didn’t?), respondents thought that only about 15% of their employees are currently using blogs / wikis / podcasts / RSS / social networking for business, not purely personal, purposes.

On the other hand, I’ve heard this meme about how kids today don’t use email — IM and MySpace are better — and so when they go to work in large companies, they will take their behavior with them. RRW quotes the Forrester study:

“For example, Adobe told Forrester that one of its European CIO customers required PlayStation support because the firm had a handful of Millennials who used PlayStations instead of PCs.”

I think that’s bullshit, honestly. But it is true that people — kids and adults — will do what is necessary to get their jobs done, and if the tools that IT offers aren’t adequate, they go outside for what they need:

“It might be that not only are the users more comfortable with the web apps they “grew up with,” it’s also possible that, despite their supposed tech-savviness, they don’t actually know how to use traditional enterprise software. Could it be that what the users actually “need” is training? Could they be turning to lightweight applications because they don’t truly grasp the complexities of or know how to use the software IT has provided? I would say that it’s more than possible.”

Yes! More than possible. The comments on the RRW piece are interesting because so many of them key in on this issue — how bad enterprise software is. And it’s true; I can barely figure out how to use Novell’s very expensive and newly deployed internal enterprise software: I’m intimidated by it and do everything I can to avoid it.

But what is conservative IT going to do about this usability issue? Again, a quote from a respondent in the Forrester study via RRW:

“We need to maintain a minimal and consistent software installation, containing programs which are commonly used throughout the business world. We do not have the time or resources to train and hand-hold new users to our company because they want to use Firefox, Google Docs, or whatever the next ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ program is.”

Let’s unpack this quote a bit, since it’s full of nine kinds of suck. It reflects a common concern to ease the manageability burden by reducing variation and thus, supposedly, complexity, presumably for the desktop. Note that there’s no differentiation, no competitive advantage, implied in this; it’s either minimal or whatever is commonly used. But when users want something — not that Firefox is new, but *whatever* — they are resistant, supposedly because it’s so hard to learn and they don’t have the time to train them. My three year old daughter uses Firefox successfully and she’s only been recently potty-trained, so if your customers know enough not to crap in their pants, they can probably use Firefox.

Furthermore, their customers, their end users, are asking for it, and there are good technical and security reasons to use Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox isn’t more expensive — it’s free, as in beer, damnit, as well as freedom — and it’s not somehow more difficult to administer than IE. They don’t want to let their users have Firefox because it represents change and something new, even though it’s obviously better and their users are requesting it.

Also, their list of web 2.0 ‘applications’ is telling; since when is Firefox, a web browser, a web 2.0 application? But the one that gets me is the ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ program. That is their signal that they think this is all baloney and can’t be bothered to keep up with it, presumably because they are grizzled IT veterans and think that this whole web 2.0 thing — probably the web 1.0 thing for that matter — is a fad.

What we’re going to end up with, inevitably, is all of the above; silly ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ applications alongside mainframe apps and everything else. And I bet when we look back on all of this twenty five years from now, there are still going to be VMS help desks.

Michael Arrington notes that the Yahoo acquisition is getting very expensive, in terms of Microsoft’s market cap; Microsoft has “lost nearly $40 billion in market cap in the eight trading days since they made their offer.” In other words, “Microsoft has shrunk by a Yahoo in the last eight days.”

Henry Blodget has a must-read piece on the logic of the deal; he argues that Microsoft is confusing the ad-driven consumer business with the license-driven corporate business. This makes sense to me; Microsoft needs to defend the Office franchise in the corporate environment, where even Google is getting license revenue ($50/user/year for Google Apps) in lieu of advertising. Enterprises aren’t going to use ad-supported free software, at least not in any future I can see. So why should Microsoft take on the pain that is Yahoo for the consumer side? Blodget writes, “Put differently, the part of Google that threatens Microsoft’s core Windows and Office business is Google Apps, not Google Search.”

So the question becomes: how do you analyze all this? Traditionally, people have taken a static reporting approach, which has its place, but you need more when you have to be actively responsive. When was the last time David Hasselhof logged on? Where was he? What systems did he log onto? Did he look at Michael Jackson’s billing records?

Long ago, people thought that some kind of library-like structure was required in order to discover information on the Internet, but it turned out that brute-force searching was better. Likewise in this case, where the end goal is a Google-like interface. Now, this approach has its limitations. You have to know what you’re looking for, first of all. It doesn’t do correlations. It’s got a beautifully simple interface, but it’s not an easy UI for normal, proactive review. It’s not for canned reports. It’s not a SEM (Security Event Manager, or SIEM: Security Information and Event Manager) tool.

But for what it is, it’s great. It’s easy to look at Splunk and say, “you’re just indexing text,” but there is great power in that; look at Google. There been such a huge emphasis on auditability that we’ve generated huge files of events, but mostly they just sit there unloved. Splunk is a good way to leverage that resource.

All the initial reports suggest that Microsoft, presumably under the watchful eye of Ray Ozzie, got this one right; it’s fast, small, beautiful, and reclaims space for Microsoft on the desktop. Can Office on Silverlight be far behind?

I’ve used the New York Times Reader (free trial, $15/mo., included with paper subscription) which is based on Silverlight and it is a great experience. You don’t need to be online to use it; in fact, it sort of blurs the distinction between being on and off line to the extent that you don’t really care so much. And it has rich controls for viewing, much better, because it’s customized for reading a newspaper, than a plain old browser, even with all the cool Javascript and prefetching tricks.

Lazlo claims some corporate customers, but from what I’ve seen Rich Internet Applications are in their infancy in the enterprise. Silverlight’s got an advantage there, of course, because of all the armies of VB and .Net developers who now have another tool at their disposal; it will be interesting to see what they build.