Not since the likes of Zan & Jayna have twin powers activated as they have with the joint appearance of CEOs for IBM & Google at IBM’s PartnerWorld conference this year. As they put it in the Computer World article entitled Google and IBM are bonding in a serious way, “The two CEOs bantered like old golf buddies, praising each other’s organizations and rarely giving moderator Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, a chance to ask questions.” Schmidt said, “Cloud computing is the story of our lifetime.” Concluding, “Eventually all devices will be on the network.” Schmidt was joined onstage by IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, who said the relationship marks a new territory “It is the first time we have taken something from the consumer arena and applied it to the enterprise.” So, whats with the the oldest computer giant pairing with the latest? Maybe its just that the industry is growing up and its become something new.

Google: Shape of 600 lb. Search Gorilla

Google continues to take shape with things like updating its Finance site, giving Google Video a face lift, and continued production of solutions helping others go green. While IBM, the hardware giant of the pair seems in step, this is possible largely because of the dancing space Google’s created; causing Microsoft and Yahoo to consider a merger, analog advertising to fall apart, cell phone networks to become open, and especially bringing a new advertising domain to the table in the form of its massive YouTube audience. These days, nothings too far from the reach of this 600 lb. Googrilla that grew up dominating the tech-world. Google-inspired engineering is especially apparent at IBM with services like Many Eyes and History Flow.

IBM: Form of Enterprise Cloud

The created space hasn’t gone to waste. In all of 2007, IBM reported sales of $98.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2006, leaving most sure of its stranglehold on enterprise service and hardware sales for the time being. The line is blurring between the two companies — Google and IBM — and its making these power twins much more identical these days. Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt had made some admissions to that point. “There’s not that much difference between the enterprise cloud and the consumer cloud,” Schmidt said. Later the CEO even offered a distinction which displays the two companies shared reasoning, “The cloud has higher value in business; that’s the secret to our collaboration,” Schmidt added.

The Greater Story: The Grid

The fact is, theres a greater story to be told. It has to due with all these players and a metamorphosis taking place in the industry. It started with the Internet and continues with the creation of the “Cloud” — a generic name for a platform for utility computing that hopes to eventually process, store and transfer every bit of information on Earth. Its a changeover whereas time passes and giants collide in sometimes peaceful ways as with Google and IBM, and sometimes violent ways as once forced together Microsoft gives up its bid for Yahoo. The metaphors of a Gorilla creating space invokes a more forceful saying as well: Lead, follow, or get out of the way. And as once before humanity saw the local energy provider take shape to become the power company, then become regional, and then global — from a network to a grid — so digital information processing, storage and transfer will go from the unit of the PC, to a network, to an Internet, to a Cloud, later becoming an equally, finely, more tightly bound and integrated Grid of utility computing devices (perhaps it’ll even run on International Google Machines).

I haven’t given this thing (the OOXML Spec) much of my time on this blog, sorry. Its just that, the whole standard, including the spec, is one huge, smelly piece of crap. Sorry, as articulate as you may think me, those are the choice words of description for such a work of disaster and stupidity. But, rather then I spending my time (or wasting your time) explaining why OOXML is so crappy, to you each, my beloved readers, I’d rather simply show you the pictures and have you draw the conclusion. Below is… the simple… easy to use… Microsoft XML standard. I’ll let you borrow it for the weekend, so you can get up to speed.

The beauty of this article is its unwillingness to question the basis of what it dubs “Corporate” IT while obviously, what it dubs “Shadow” IT, seems to be the more successful school-of-thought for supplying immediate IT solutions (and thats even by the articles account). Oh, and by the way, just for the record, I agree: Shadow IT works better.

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This is an interesting approach to trying to understand, and discuss computer-related security. It looks at the differences in Open-Source and Closed-Source software development models and their methodologies. The article looks at some of the well-known schools of thought like “security through obscurity” or “security through visibility”. And, at the same time it offers some insight on exactly how niche environments can dictate their preferred method. I found it to be unbiased, well conceived, and well written.