Harvard Business School and other major Universities are beginning to add open source into the curriculum. This is a sign that open source is starting to get the attention of many in the business world and curriculum's are adjusting to address this shift. In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review we see a fictional case study involving the decision process required to decide whether or not a company should embrace open source business model or keep their software closed.

Bloggers take note: "Blogging can kill". The NYTimes posted an article about the high stress world of professional bloggers. It cited two recent deaths of well known bloggers. Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology, dead at 60 from a heart attack and Marc Orchant dead at 50 from a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack last year.

Does your business want to use gmail, or other google hosted web services but don't want the @gmail.com or google.com domain suffix. Well a useful service from google allows you to use your business domain for google hosted services.

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

The WSJ seems to put to rest the idea that Microsoft will sweeten its $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo! Microsoft feels that it can wait and is prepare to hunker down and battle till the end. They feel amid the turbulent economic times that their offer is more than fair.

Dell may soon go the way of the Dodo bird. All the signs are there. Some of their recent announcements are setting off warning signals.

These include:
1) Announcements of additional job cuts (5,600 more jobs in addition to the 3,200 already announced).

Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? That is the premise of a recent Wired IT article.

Some would say that not all rewards are financial ones. Open source is motivated by community, social interactions, and peer recognition.

The NYTimes had an interesting article discussing some of the reasons why we can still find old technologies like the mainframe still kicking around in many business environment.

The CEO of Red Hat at the recent Open Source Business Conference claimed that open source technologies are benefiting from the unpopularity of the US. He suggests that people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S. in "intellectual property" taxes. He claims that he's talked to governments like China and Russia and they are very keen on deploying technologies that are not tied to any IP laws of the US.

You can bet that Apple wants to move the iphone into the corporate world to compete with the likes of Research in Motion. Their ambitions don't stop there. They now see an opportunity to enter the much sought after world of enterprise computing. They should consider the iphone their "trojan horse" into the corporate IT world.

These jobs will experience strong growth and be in great demand for the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics(BLS).

Information technology

1. Network systems and data communications analysts
Projected growth by 2016: 53 percent
Median annual salary: $64,600*

2. Computer applications software engineers
Projected growth by 2016: 45 percent
Median annual salary: $79,780

3. Database administrators
Projected growth by 2016: 29 percent
Median annual salary: $64,670

4. Computer systems software engineers

CIOinsight.com published 12 ways to earn higher IT salaries. Really the title should read "How to Increase Any Salary in any Industry" because the suggestions outlined could be applied to almost any industry.

The list includes the following (I've added my own commentary to all of the bullet items):

1 Work for a Larger Company. Larger comanies (>$1B in revenue) consistently pay more than smaller companies.

Since the announcement that Toshiba was giving up its HD-DVD format prices of Blu-Ray players have risen sharply.

A quick price scan from BestBuy.com comparing Blu-ray players prices on January 1st vs. March 12th show a ~14-30% increase for some of the most popular brands:

* Sony’s BDP-S300 rose 30% ($307 to $399)
* Panasonic’s DMP-BD30K rose 19% ($399 to $449)
* Samsung’s BD-P1400 rose 18% ($329 to $399)

An interesting article in the Wall Street journal tries to outline some reasons as to why most business executives fail to see the value of IT within an organization.

IT has been proven to provide numerous competitive advantages within the business world. Companies like UPS, FedEx, Netflix, Amazon, Google to name a few have differentiated themselves through innovative uses of information technology.

Email has become the standard communication tool in today’s business world. Those able to write effectively have shown to be more likely to be promoted or advance their careers more quickly than those who lack writing skills.

You don’t have to have a degree in writing to be an effective email writer. Following some simple “email etiquette guidelines” will go a long way in become an effective communicator via email.