What say ye techies?

[Francis Hwang]

The service discussed below sounds a lot like 
Application-Service-Providers, which were more en vogue a few years 
ago. (Until a few ASPs went down in flames, taking valuable client 
data with them, and suddenly you had a few companies who lost a 
year's worth of human-resources data or something similarly 
catastrophic.) In theory such an arrangement can get some efficiency 
out of it -- thousands of businesses let other companies host their 
websites, to take an easy example -- but in practice it can get 
pretty murky.

More related to the Microsoft-vs-Linux war: This isn't likely to do 
much to erode Microsoft's hold. The reason Microsoft can offer 
services that lock out Linux machines is that its standards are 
closed, and nobody can write a Linux client for, say, MSN Messenger 
because they never get to see the standards. Linux standards are 
generally promiscuously open, and most every significant Linux-based 
service has an existing MS Windows clone. So this won't probably be 
locking out any Microsoft users, really.

As regards China, the really big problem is imagining them trusting 
IBM to hold Chinese code on IBM servers and not peeking. IBM, last I 
checked, was a big Western capitalistic corporation, Linux or not, 
which would do little to nothing to mollify the fears of China and 
its budding technocrats.

Francis