A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Office PC Slims Down talks about the benefits of thin clients. I'm a fan of thin clients for many business situations (especially for point-of-sale).
The article had this interesting yet ... (odd? scary? pathetic? mind-boggling?) bit of insight into the operation of the US Military Bureaucracy in Washington:
"Getting rid of Office wasn't an option," Mr. Durante notes. "You can't run a war without PowerPoint."
(According to the article, Ryan Duarte is a program manager involved in "switching some 30,000 users in various intelligence services from Windows-based servers to Sun Microsystems thin clients.")
It's good to know that people in the intelligence community would be moving to more secure computing environments ...
... But one has to wonder whether recent controversies might be partially the result of the corrosive dumbing down PowerPoint presentations lead to?
What a relief that our enemies in Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and elsewhere don't have access to Microsoft software... I'll sleep better tonight knowing they are denied such a key military advantage over us.
(Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy)
—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, April 05, 2005 at 21:40