Over the past few days I've taken a vacation from the media as well as the Net and have been thinking about things. It was a way to avoid the media - seeing the second tower get hit in real time is something that still troubles me at a deep and fundamental level.
This afternoon I came out of the haze and found myself talking with some folks who were in the middle of a Windows disaster. It seems they had taken delivery on twenty shiny new Dells a few days ago and things have - well - degenerated. It started out with an incompatibility with their backup application and then something went wrong with their wireless network and then ... you probably know the story.
When I saw them they had three working machines out of sixty - all of those were running Linux. Somehow they had managed to kill net for all of their windows machines and all of the Dells were really dead.
There are clearly some interesting vulnerabilities, above and beyond the normal hassles of Windows, that could be exploited by serious people. (I will ignore the Net, which has some fundamental problems of its own). It is frightening to contemplate the nation's reliance - or, considering the business practices of the supplier - the addiction, to a pair of flawed products.
It is nothing new, but I really believe (based on chats with serious population ecologists) that we need at least three primary operating systems with the most popular installed on less than half of the nation's computers. The same goes for the office suite.
Perhaps the thing to do is have the government (who should be worried about this) internally mandate something like this on itself. Linux, XP and Mac OS might be candidates. Some wise men and women could get together and freeze a spec for a workable Office. Say something around the turn of the millennium with dangerous features removed. All office products procured would have to read and write a common format as a default. All of the offices would support this minimal feature set (ansi-office), although extensions would be allowed.
My guess is this would encourage several new office products and Microsoft might actually produce a very nice version to compete as they try for 49% of the government market. Business and home users would benefit with the choice.
Will it (or any other non-monopoly scenario) ever fly? Of course not. Microsoft controls too much to let that happen and where would Intel be if there wasn't an inverse Moore's Law working for them (the Office suite requires twice the computing resources to perform an equivalent amount of work every eighteen months).
I was told that they guess they are probably loosing $20,000 a day spread over 60 employees. A few days of this and the cost per seat is interesting. One wonders what the losses would be for the nation if some non-trivial attacks were made on the one-true-OS/office suite combination.
8:39:40 PM 
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