I hate it when customers ask me to "reimburse you for the lost productivity" Its what lawsuits are for:P
Unless you have a backup system that yields absolutely no down time for the end user, there is a degree of "lost productivity" here. Why your customers are asking you for reimbursements for it, I don't understand (unless you happen to be a spokesperson for Dell).
Everyone makes mistakes, systems go down, things catch fire.
There is a difference between "ish happens" and "a metric ton of ish is happening right now". *A* monitor dying at work is ish happening. 25 monitors dying due to bad capacitors? That's not just random chance.
Why, even though they bought a million dollar EMC array, they have it backed up nightly with another million dollar tape robot.
Generally speaking, if the cost in data recovery and/or recreating the data requiring backup is greater than that of the equipment redundancy here, then it is worth preserving using such stringent and costly means.
Even at home, I make sure every computer I care about has a raid 1 array. There is nothing Dell, HP or even EMC can do when your drives fail. If you want to be reimbursed, you better be able to prove, in a court of law, that it was due to the incompetence of the Vendor.
Again, not the worst idea in existence if every computer in your home has important data on it. In my case my laptop runs a RAID-0, but a ZFS RAID-5 backs it up at home. But that's tangential to the topic here; the mobo's caps bursting don't generally cause data on the hard disk to be unusable.
And how many of those turntables support 78 or 16 rpm?
The Numark TTX turntables and most modern variants of the Technics 1200 series natively support 78RPM playback, and can go down to 16RPM by setting it to 33RPM and using the pitch slider to go down to 50%...okay it's 16.5RPM, but it's still pretty damn close, especially since I've never seen a 16.5RPM record.
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media.
Challenge accepted: The vinyl record.
Records made 50 years ago are still readable using my Numark TTX turntables I bought last year, using the Shure M44-7 needle I bought at Christmas. I'd dare say that most records made 80 or 90 years ago - though encoded in mono - are still able to be played back presuming the media itself is intact.
Granted back then there wasn't much in the way of digital information being written onto vinyl, but there is now - it's called timecode (i.e. Serato, Traktor, Torq, etc.). So it's not THAT much of a stretch to essentially record data modulated into sound similar to an old dial-up modem on a record, then playing it back circa 2110 assuming that it doesn't spend a sunny summer day in my car.
What about barcodes printed onto paper, or some digital variant of braille? It's not necessarily the most IDEAL way of storing data for easy retrieval - in both cases the storage density is very low and thus an admittedly low capacity - but it satisfies your requirements of being a storage medium that has survived for 50 years and is still readable by hardware in active production.
The people I know who use Limewire are teens, tweens, and nontechnical college kids. Limewire uses the Gnutella G2 protocol, though it can also handle bittorrent downloads as well. Content, I'm guessing, is fairly consistent between the eMule and Gnutella networks. Bittorrent works well for complete albums, but is a bit less adept at working for single songs (which is what most of my limewire using friends tend to do).
Like most things in life - especially technical ones, popularity and ease of use trump technical merits. Install Limewire. Search for song. Download. Listen. That's essentially what it does, and enough people use it that it's become the de facto standard for less technically minded people. Limewire came into popularity after Kazaa and Morpheus faded into oblivion, and Napster before it. It was embraced and made popular by the nontechnical masses, many of whom believed that paying the one time $20 fee "made it legal".
And you, Web designers, get a clue and link to your bloody videos so that people can get it and watch it regardless of which browser they use.
In broad theory, this is among the issues that Flash is supposed to solve, while simultaneously not making an easy avenue for the server to be DDoSed by having the video downloaded by a whole botnet simultaneously. Flash doesn't succeed nearly as well as I'd like and I'm not trying to defend its poor implementation of the idea, but "watch regardless of your browser or OS" is part of the issue that Flash (poorly) addresses.
oh it's all configurable by each individual customer, and can be changed at any time, for any reason. If you want to give the *AA permission to spend your money on hookers, that's up to you.
Digital REFUND Management. When my access to the content stops, their ability to use the money I paid for that access stops. Put whatever system you want into play, 'cuz if it breaks, I get my money back. Oh, my solution also allows me to determine what my money is spent on, and it defaults to preventing its expenditure on lawyers, lobbyists, hookers, drug dealers, and overly intrusive advertising campaigns.
Personally, I think it's fair. I might be a bit biased though.
-RIM has App World. -Nokia has the largest marketshare worldwide for handset sales. -Microsoft *DOES* have a market place for 6.x...actually it's called Windows Mobile Marketplace.
That said, Apple has the commanding lead over MOBILE APP SALES vs. anyone else listed, regardless of the fact that they aren't the top dog in HANDSET sales.
As a tangential point, I do wonder if Apple's colorful pie charts also include app sales for the iPod Touch, which certainly must account for a nontrivial percentage of the sales figures.
I think it's more like "the few that actually do don't last in the business very long". I do agree though, that it seems like every day we're inching closer to a future eerily close to the one depicted in Wall-E.
What bothers me the most though is when sites that I *DO* pay for start pulling this targeted ad crap. Earlier this year I signed up for eHarmony. spent $150 for the three month kitchen-sink plan...AND THERE WERE STILL ADS!!! What the heck? Conversely, virtually every website I went to started serving up banner ads for eHarmony...uhm...I already paid it, why would I need an ad to tell me about a service I ALREADY SUBSCRIBED TO??!? Given that experience and the case study of cable TV, I'm not at all in favor of paywalls and micropayments - it's just a matter of time before they turn into macropayments and serve ads on top of it.
Come on, something has to give somewhere. This announcement is worse than vapor. It's vapor that can never exist. Lame.
You must have missed the last few seasons of 24. Jack Bauer had a phone that never dropped a call (even on airplanes, choppers, and in subway tunnels), never had a dead battery, and had 3D animations instantaneously transferred from Chloe and rendered on his phone in real time. Apparently Motorola has been holding out on the rest of us.
In my experience, there's a point at which repairing a Windows install is more time consuming than, as you pointed out, just reinstalling the whole thing from scratch. Personally, I more-or-less draw the line when Combofix + NOD32 Rescue Disk + Malwarebytes in that order don't take care of a given infection, since about 8 times out of 10, it does. If there's a particular reason why someone cannot have their machine formatted (I carry OEM XP/Vista/7 install media in my laptop bag), they pay by the hour for the pull/patch/google-the-error-message cycle. Most people understand and are cool with it. I tend to Acronis the old machine anyway just in case I forget to restore an obscure file in an obscure directory.
After a situation like the one you describe, I'd ultimately opt to install Microsoft SteadyState and lock that computer down. only the most relentless of infections will be able to infect the steadystate image. It's probably the better alternative to the monthly install process you're talking about. nLite is great and I use it very frequently, but a monthly reinstallation is unnecessary for most users when SteadyState and a separate data partition will do the job.
Windows 7 is pretty strict about what it lets happen in the system directories. Personally, I like deleting all of my system sounds. On XP, this takes all of about 15 seconds. On 7, it takes several minutes of messing with file and folder permissions for Windows to let me do the same task. It was a pain at the time, but it did make it apparent that writing to the system directory was not nearly as simple as XP. That may be at least part of the reason why the Win7 machine was more resilient.
I'd just like to add a couple of my faves as well...
-The "Aero Snap" feature seems like a gimmick until you actually use it - I can't tell you how many times I've felt like a schmuck trying to do that on XP, because I use it a lot.
-Help documentation that's ACTUALLY RELEVANT.
-What amounts to "Acronis True Image Lite" built right into the OS - the backup system is nice, actually works, and I've been more successful restoring from it than I was with the XP backup utility.
-The startup repair utilities ACTUALLY WORK. In my experience (at least during the beta when I messed around more and wreaked havoc semi-intentionally), the startup repair fixed EVERY issue my system had that prevented it from starting, and didn't require any user intervention.
-I swore I'd never use instant search, but on more than one occasion it's been handy.
-I also swore I wouldn't use the libraries, but it's a rather efficient way of aggregating folders that sit on different drives or network locations.
-Remote Desktop that can work with multiple monitors ON multiple monitors.
-Faster startup and shutdown (yes, over XP. No, not exaggerating).
IMO there isn't one specific "killer app" anymore, but the $90 I spent on my OEM copy was not a purchase I regret.
Re:Bankers would rather eat their young...
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
No surprise about your bank staying on old stuff; Bankers would rather eat their young than let go of a little money. I'll bet the hardware wouldn't support Vista or 7.
In their defense, many banks were among the first to adopt computers back in the old iron mainframe days. Bucks to beans that virtually every bank that's been around for longer than 20 years STILL has an AS/400 somewhere in their organization. When you have both a huge volume of transactions happening and the trifecta of a legal, PR, *AND* a fiscal nightmare if an error occurs, you wouldn't be upgrading your hardware on any frequent basis, either.
While there is a degree of truth to the fact that banks tend to be a little tight fisted, there are other factors than mere stinginess that lead to their technological times resembling that of an aircraft carrier.
AT&T's plans will effectively CUT costs for 98% of their user base.
Only 2% who slurp down porn flick after porn flick on their mobile phone will ever exceed 2gig. You know who you are...
They also said that 65% would be fine with the 200MB plan. The question is how they will handle overages. Automatically get another gig for $10? Most people would swallow that. $0.02/KByte...not so much. I don't know about AT&T, but I know that T-Mobile doesn't afford me the opportunity to buy 100 extra minutes for $10-$15 if I know I'm about to hit my limit for minute usage, so I think that how they handle overages is going to be key.
I think it can easily turn ugly for app developers. If I had a 2GB tier - especially since I tether, I'd be wary of using Pandora, simply because I MIGHT need the bytes for something else later. What would be a solid way for Apple to work with AT&T on this is to allow per-app settings and let users decide whether an app can use the 3G connection, or Wi-Fi only. But no matter which way you slice it, the only way you'll end up with people not showing up with torches and pitchforks is to make sure that new users have ways to manage and control their data use - and ultimately use as LITTLE data as possible. Again, virtually EVERYONE who tethers will see their usage spike - them auto-update settings on everyone's apps can be a doozy.
As if anyone these days needed the instructions: I'm pretty sure 99.999% of fliers are already familiar with the procedures, there's an illustrated card on the back of every seat, and people can pretty much rely on common sense.
Not that any of that is worth shit when the plane plows into the ground at 160 kmph, and you have lim(0) chance of survival with or without having listened through the lecture.
It would ofcourse be good if google "ate their own dogfood" so to speak. I have always found it strange that tech demos from Google always show a Windows or OS X computer.
I'd have found it strange if they DID do a demo using ChromeOS. The whole point of a demo is to stir up public interest. The public is stupid and in many cases doesn't understand that there is a dfference between a web app and a local app. Demo on ChromeOS = "ZoMg I have to change everything to use this? no thanks!". Demo on Windows = "ZoMg this works with what I already have!" I wouldn't be surprise if EVENTUALLY Google starts doing demos on ChomeOS if/when it starts to take off, but until the general public has it available, I don't think it makes sense for them to put up an unnecessary psychological barrier during a tech demo.
Hopefully this will change with Chrome OS, which should be ideal for the "office droids", whereas a more complete Linux distro could work for developers.
Depends on the office. The finance department where I work requires half a dozen Windows specific apps that won't run on anything else, including ChromeOS. Heck, there are a few that we'll be waiting until the end of the year to get Windows 7 support, so even moving them off XP isn't happening this year. These apps don't work in the cloud. ChromeOS is a non-starter here. I've consulted at a few other businesses, and virtually every one of them had some unique platform specific app: A gym used "Go Figure", a hair salon used the Mac specific "STX", another office used the vertical integration of "ACT!" and Peachtree Accounting, and my tax guy has some specific tax calculation voodoo app whose name escapes me. All of the above, for the most part, fit the description of "office drones", and none of them could just get ChromeOS and go - they'd be screwed if Windows were replaced because they couldn't do their job. Word+Excel+Outlook+Internet Explorer != Every office's complete compliment of applications.
Full disclosure: my employer is a Microsoft Reseller.
That said, you're right in that Windows Server + Exchange = overkill for small businesses. However, the small business demographic is generally served well by SBS: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/server/default.aspx Windows Server + SQL Server + Exchange rolled into one box and scaled down for the SMB market.
If you can cram an SSD and an optical drive into the same space, you no longer need room for that 2.5"/3.5" laptop HDD/SSD.
the flip side to this logic is that in most cases, both of these can be replaced in less than 10 minutes with nothing more than an eyeglass screwdriver. Consolidating them hopefully also involves the ability to detach them, because I'd hate to have to replace my hard disk because my Blu-Ray drive died, or vice versa. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but the increased cost of replacement doesn't sound to wonderful, especially if it also involved the added headache of having to clone the hard drive unnecessarily.
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I hate it when customers ask me to "reimburse you for the lost productivity" Its what lawsuits are for:P
Unless you have a backup system that yields absolutely no down time for the end user, there is a degree of "lost productivity" here. Why your customers are asking you for reimbursements for it, I don't understand (unless you happen to be a spokesperson for Dell).
Everyone makes mistakes, systems go down, things catch fire.
There is a difference between "ish happens" and "a metric ton of ish is happening right now". *A* monitor dying at work is ish happening. 25 monitors dying due to bad capacitors? That's not just random chance.
Why, even though they bought a million dollar EMC array, they have it backed up nightly with another million dollar tape robot.
Generally speaking, if the cost in data recovery and/or recreating the data requiring backup is greater than that of the equipment redundancy here, then it is worth preserving using such stringent and costly means.
Even at home, I make sure every computer I care about has a raid 1 array. There is nothing Dell, HP or even EMC can do when your drives fail. If you want to be reimbursed, you better be able to prove, in a court of law, that it was due to the incompetence of the Vendor.
Again, not the worst idea in existence if every computer in your home has important data on it. In my case my laptop runs a RAID-0, but a ZFS RAID-5 backs it up at home. But that's tangential to the topic here; the mobo's caps bursting don't generally cause data on the hard disk to be unusable.
right...but the password is...1...2...3...4...5.
And how many of those turntables support 78 or 16 rpm?
The Numark TTX turntables and most modern variants of the Technics 1200 series natively support 78RPM playback, and can go down to 16RPM by setting it to 33RPM and using the pitch slider to go down to 50%...okay it's 16.5RPM, but it's still pretty damn close, especially since I've never seen a 16.5RPM record.
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media.
Challenge accepted: The vinyl record.
Records made 50 years ago are still readable using my Numark TTX turntables I bought last year, using the Shure M44-7 needle I bought at Christmas. I'd dare say that most records made 80 or 90 years ago - though encoded in mono - are still able to be played back presuming the media itself is intact.
Granted back then there wasn't much in the way of digital information being written onto vinyl, but there is now - it's called timecode (i.e. Serato, Traktor, Torq, etc.). So it's not THAT much of a stretch to essentially record data modulated into sound similar to an old dial-up modem on a record, then playing it back circa 2110 assuming that it doesn't spend a sunny summer day in my car.
What about barcodes printed onto paper, or some digital variant of braille? It's not necessarily the most IDEAL way of storing data for easy retrieval - in both cases the storage density is very low and thus an admittedly low capacity - but it satisfies your requirements of being a storage medium that has survived for 50 years and is still readable by hardware in active production.
It's 7 of 9, tertiary adjunct of unimatrix 01. Lots of numbers in that one, really.
The people I know who use Limewire are teens, tweens, and nontechnical college kids. Limewire uses the Gnutella G2 protocol, though it can also handle bittorrent downloads as well. Content, I'm guessing, is fairly consistent between the eMule and Gnutella networks. Bittorrent works well for complete albums, but is a bit less adept at working for single songs (which is what most of my limewire using friends tend to do).
Like most things in life - especially technical ones, popularity and ease of use trump technical merits. Install Limewire. Search for song. Download. Listen. That's essentially what it does, and enough people use it that it's become the de facto standard for less technically minded people. Limewire came into popularity after Kazaa and Morpheus faded into oblivion, and Napster before it. It was embraced and made popular by the nontechnical masses, many of whom believed that paying the one time $20 fee "made it legal".
And you, Web designers,
get a clue and link to your bloody videos so that people can get it and watch it regardless of
which browser they use.
In broad theory, this is among the issues that Flash is supposed to solve, while simultaneously not making an easy avenue for the server to be DDoSed by having the video downloaded by a whole botnet simultaneously. Flash doesn't succeed nearly as well as I'd like and I'm not trying to defend its poor implementation of the idea, but "watch regardless of your browser or OS" is part of the issue that Flash (poorly) addresses.
oh it's all configurable by each individual customer, and can be changed at any time, for any reason. If you want to give the *AA permission to spend your money on hookers, that's up to you.
Digital REFUND Management. When my access to the content stops, their ability to use the money I paid for that access stops. Put whatever system you want into play, 'cuz if it breaks, I get my money back. Oh, my solution also allows me to determine what my money is spent on, and it defaults to preventing its expenditure on lawyers, lobbyists, hookers, drug dealers, and overly intrusive advertising campaigns.
Personally, I think it's fair. I might be a bit biased though.
...Sony thanks you...
These words should never be together in a sentence.
Sounds like the first half of a Soviet Russia joke, which given the wide scale piracy happening over there, doesn't seem too inaccurate.
AT&T network is getting slammed all over the place - slow, unreliable, and insecure.
Technically, it's AT&T's website that's insecure, not their network.
He didn't specify CELLULAR network.
Yes it does. Unfortunately most people don't understand what the right to bare arms was intended for.
...To ensure that Congress never took away our right to wear short-sleeved shirts?
Just a few quibbles here...
-RIM has App World.
-Nokia has the largest marketshare worldwide for handset sales.
-Microsoft *DOES* have a market place for 6.x...actually it's called Windows Mobile Marketplace.
That said, Apple has the commanding lead over MOBILE APP SALES vs. anyone else listed, regardless of the fact that they aren't the top dog in HANDSET sales.
As a tangential point, I do wonder if Apple's colorful pie charts also include app sales for the iPod Touch, which certainly must account for a nontrivial percentage of the sales figures.
I think it's more like "the few that actually do don't last in the business very long". I do agree though, that it seems like every day we're inching closer to a future eerily close to the one depicted in Wall-E.
What bothers me the most though is when sites that I *DO* pay for start pulling this targeted ad crap. Earlier this year I signed up for eHarmony. spent $150 for the three month kitchen-sink plan...AND THERE WERE STILL ADS!!! What the heck? Conversely, virtually every website I went to started serving up banner ads for eHarmony...uhm...I already paid it, why would I need an ad to tell me about a service I ALREADY SUBSCRIBED TO??!? Given that experience and the case study of cable TV, I'm not at all in favor of paywalls and micropayments - it's just a matter of time before they turn into macropayments and serve ads on top of it.
Come on, something has to give somewhere. This announcement is worse than vapor. It's vapor that can never exist. Lame.
You must have missed the last few seasons of 24. Jack Bauer had a phone that never dropped a call (even on airplanes, choppers, and in subway tunnels), never had a dead battery, and had 3D animations instantaneously transferred from Chloe and rendered on his phone in real time. Apparently Motorola has been holding out on the rest of us.
this will make your computer go from a leaf blower to a vacuum cleaner. *sigh*
So my computer will now suck instead of blow?
Interesting read.
In my experience, there's a point at which repairing a Windows install is more time consuming than, as you pointed out, just reinstalling the whole thing from scratch. Personally, I more-or-less draw the line when Combofix + NOD32 Rescue Disk + Malwarebytes in that order don't take care of a given infection, since about 8 times out of 10, it does. If there's a particular reason why someone cannot have their machine formatted (I carry OEM XP/Vista/7 install media in my laptop bag), they pay by the hour for the pull/patch/google-the-error-message cycle. Most people understand and are cool with it. I tend to Acronis the old machine anyway just in case I forget to restore an obscure file in an obscure directory.
After a situation like the one you describe, I'd ultimately opt to install Microsoft SteadyState and lock that computer down. only the most relentless of infections will be able to infect the steadystate image. It's probably the better alternative to the monthly install process you're talking about. nLite is great and I use it very frequently, but a monthly reinstallation is unnecessary for most users when SteadyState and a separate data partition will do the job.
Windows 7 is pretty strict about what it lets happen in the system directories. Personally, I like deleting all of my system sounds. On XP, this takes all of about 15 seconds. On 7, it takes several minutes of messing with file and folder permissions for Windows to let me do the same task. It was a pain at the time, but it did make it apparent that writing to the system directory was not nearly as simple as XP. That may be at least part of the reason why the Win7 machine was more resilient.
I'd just like to add a couple of my faves as well...
-The "Aero Snap" feature seems like a gimmick until you actually use it - I can't tell you how many times I've felt like a schmuck trying to do that on XP, because I use it a lot.
-Help documentation that's ACTUALLY RELEVANT.
-What amounts to "Acronis True Image Lite" built right into the OS - the backup system is nice, actually works, and I've been more successful restoring from it than I was with the XP backup utility.
-The startup repair utilities ACTUALLY WORK. In my experience (at least during the beta when I messed around more and wreaked havoc semi-intentionally), the startup repair fixed EVERY issue my system had that prevented it from starting, and didn't require any user intervention.
-I swore I'd never use instant search, but on more than one occasion it's been handy.
-I also swore I wouldn't use the libraries, but it's a rather efficient way of aggregating folders that sit on different drives or network locations.
-Remote Desktop that can work with multiple monitors ON multiple monitors.
-Faster startup and shutdown (yes, over XP. No, not exaggerating).
IMO there isn't one specific "killer app" anymore, but the $90 I spent on my OEM copy was not a purchase I regret.
No surprise about your bank staying on old stuff; Bankers would rather eat their young than let go of a little money. I'll bet the hardware wouldn't support Vista or 7.
In their defense, many banks were among the first to adopt computers back in the old iron mainframe days. Bucks to beans that virtually every bank that's been around for longer than 20 years STILL has an AS/400 somewhere in their organization. When you have both a huge volume of transactions happening and the trifecta of a legal, PR, *AND* a fiscal nightmare if an error occurs, you wouldn't be upgrading your hardware on any frequent basis, either.
While there is a degree of truth to the fact that banks tend to be a little tight fisted, there are other factors than mere stinginess that lead to their technological times resembling that of an aircraft carrier.
I find your ideas fascinating and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
...so post your printer's e-mail address!
AT&T's plans will effectively CUT costs for 98% of their user base.
Only 2% who slurp down porn flick after porn flick on their mobile phone will ever exceed 2gig. You know who you are...
They also said that 65% would be fine with the 200MB plan. The question is how they will handle overages. Automatically get another gig for $10? Most people would swallow that. $0.02/KByte...not so much. I don't know about AT&T, but I know that T-Mobile doesn't afford me the opportunity to buy 100 extra minutes for $10-$15 if I know I'm about to hit my limit for minute usage, so I think that how they handle overages is going to be key.
I think it can easily turn ugly for app developers. If I had a 2GB tier - especially since I tether, I'd be wary of using Pandora, simply because I MIGHT need the bytes for something else later. What would be a solid way for Apple to work with AT&T on this is to allow per-app settings and let users decide whether an app can use the 3G connection, or Wi-Fi only. But no matter which way you slice it, the only way you'll end up with people not showing up with torches and pitchforks is to make sure that new users have ways to manage and control their data use - and ultimately use as LITTLE data as possible. Again, virtually EVERYONE who tethers will see their usage spike - them auto-update settings on everyone's apps can be a doozy.
As if anyone these days needed the instructions: I'm pretty sure 99.999% of fliers are already familiar with the procedures, there's an illustrated card on the back of every seat, and people can pretty much rely on common sense.
Not that any of that is worth shit when the plane plows into the ground at 160 kmph, and you have lim(0) chance of survival with or without having listened through the lecture.
If you're confused...George Carlin summed it up better than every flight attendant I've ever heard...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DagVklB4VHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjKciefHo38&feature=related
It would ofcourse be good if google "ate their own dogfood" so to speak. I have always found it strange that tech demos from Google always show a Windows or OS X computer.
I'd have found it strange if they DID do a demo using ChromeOS. The whole point of a demo is to stir up public interest. The public is stupid and in many cases doesn't understand that there is a dfference between a web app and a local app. Demo on ChromeOS = "ZoMg I have to change everything to use this? no thanks!". Demo on Windows = "ZoMg this works with what I already have!" I wouldn't be surprise if EVENTUALLY Google starts doing demos on ChomeOS if/when it starts to take off, but until the general public has it available, I don't think it makes sense for them to put up an unnecessary psychological barrier during a tech demo.
Hopefully this will change with Chrome OS, which should be ideal for the "office droids", whereas a more complete Linux distro could work for developers.
Depends on the office. The finance department where I work requires half a dozen Windows specific apps that won't run on anything else, including ChromeOS. Heck, there are a few that we'll be waiting until the end of the year to get Windows 7 support, so even moving them off XP isn't happening this year. These apps don't work in the cloud. ChromeOS is a non-starter here. I've consulted at a few other businesses, and virtually every one of them had some unique platform specific app: A gym used "Go Figure", a hair salon used the Mac specific "STX", another office used the vertical integration of "ACT!" and Peachtree Accounting, and my tax guy has some specific tax calculation voodoo app whose name escapes me. All of the above, for the most part, fit the description of "office drones", and none of them could just get ChromeOS and go - they'd be screwed if Windows were replaced because they couldn't do their job.
Word+Excel+Outlook+Internet Explorer != Every office's complete compliment of applications.
Full disclosure: my employer is a Microsoft Reseller.
That said, you're right in that Windows Server + Exchange = overkill for small businesses. However, the small business demographic is generally served well by SBS: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/server/default.aspx Windows Server + SQL Server + Exchange rolled into one box and scaled down for the SMB market.
If you can cram an SSD and an optical drive into the same space, you no longer need room for that 2.5"/3.5" laptop HDD/SSD.
the flip side to this logic is that in most cases, both of these can be replaced in less than 10 minutes with nothing more than an eyeglass screwdriver. Consolidating them hopefully also involves the ability to detach them, because I'd hate to have to replace my hard disk because my Blu-Ray drive died, or vice versa. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but the increased cost of replacement doesn't sound to wonderful, especially if it also involved the added headache of having to clone the hard drive unnecessarily.