It's long been clear to me that the biggest lock-in Microsoft has, at the enterprise level, is not with Windows or personal apps, but with Exchange Server. And the biggest problem there is this: it's good. Enterprises like it. And, since Exchange works only or best with Windows machines, the lock-in extends to much else. Linux and Mac boxes get purged and replaced by Windows ones.

Or so goes the story I hear from folks at big enterprises.

So I'm wondering about alternatives.

The Internet is infrastructure. This should be plain, but it's not. The reason is that neither the Net nor infrastructure are well-understood, even though both could hardly be more widely used.

Public wi-fi in airports and hotels is offered on the pay toilet model. It charges money to use low-cost plumbing facilities. I believe it would be better for airports, and their passengers, if plumbing usage were free, just as it is for water and trains between terminals.

Can we tell them how?

Om Malik calls this "dave winer's best post of the year". I can't recall a better one, but ranking isn't what matters here. What matters is perspective and experience, and Dave has plenty of both. What he says is,

I've always had a thing for remote control (RC) aircraft. The kid and I have several half-broken ones to prove it. So now I'm thinking about taking it to the next level. Literally. With a DIY Drone -- a kind of aerial robot.

Typeanalyzer says Linux Journal is one of The Guardians. That is,

The organizing and efficient type. They are especially attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done.

JFK said "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." So I'm here to claim Linux-based geek paternity for the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The geeks didn't do it alone, of course. But their role was huge.

It's time to start fixing telecom, even as we're moving past it. If ideas are weather systems, that's the squall I'll bring to the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London tomorrow and Wednesday. This is my first time at one (it's the fifth in their series), and I'm looking forward to it.

Paul Boutin is a friend. I love the guy. I also think his latest Wired piece — Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 — is a crock.* Two reasons. One is that blogs are fine, even if they seem passé. The other is that blogs are free and open, while Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to varying degrees are not.

I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.

Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT, was the subject of Linus Benedict Torvalds post to comp.os.minix on October 5, 1991 -- seventeen years ago today.

Says here that Internet radio is about to get a reprieve. We've been covering the fight between the RIAA and webcasters for many years, going back to the DMCA, which left working out webcasting royalties pretty much unfinished.

Until Chrome came along, Google's Master Mobile Plan didn't quite add up. Now it does. Chrome -- Google's new superbrowser -- is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let's call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux.

"In Africa people are much more attuned to blogs than you'd think." Ethan Zuckerman just said that. (You might remember Ethan from GeekCorps.) It's one quotable line among a cascade of them. And he hasn't even gotten around to the remarkable Eric Osiakwan yet. Both are talking about The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, the topic of today's luncheon at the Berkman Center. It's being streamed live, and it's so different from the usual geek fare — yet both geeky and extremely important for both Kenya and Africa.

We were lost in Boston's South End, looking for Thayer Street. Street signs are optional around Boston, and the locals didn't know either the street or our precise destination...

Back in the mid-90s, when Linux was still at 1.something, website design was a simple exercise that left matters such as font choice up to the user. It was blessedly free of the Tyranny of Typography, the Legacies of Layout, and other controlling influences from the Provinces of Print. Better yet, it was free by design from withering rebuke by aesthetes whose high-minded "taste" made life miserable for both writers and readers. Back then

Photos from Linux World Expo are up.

Heard about Knol yet? It's Google's Xth new service, and it's a place where you can put up "an authoritative article about a specific topic". That's a knol too. Article=knol.

My first encounter with Knol was at Pointless Games

Jeff Jarvis is working on a book called What Would Google Do? Since Google just did something good for me — and for a market that needs help desperately — I thought I'd share my experience with Jeff and the rest of you.

What Google Did for me was radically improve one of the most annoying experiences in the Webbed world: registering a domain name.

How long before the carriers and the FCC admit that the new transmission medium for radio is the cell system? And how long before they also recognize that the cell system is properly part of the Net's infrastructure and not just cordless telephony with messaging tacked on?