Crumbs

It comes to something when Steve Ballmer is not super-confident, but his latest analyst conference proved one exception. Or a partial one at least. One thing Microsoft's chief executive didn't hold back on was his aggressiveness towards the Linux community; the non-Novell Linux community at least.

But on the potential sales of Vista, Ballmer was surprisingly downbeat: "I think some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year '08 are overly aggressive," Ballmer told the analysts in New York.

Lower selling prices, relatively low corporate sales (many sales happened shortly after the launch date and are slowing now) and continued piracy would hamper revenue figures going forward, Ballmer said, leading to a flatter 2008 financial year.

Perhaps this is a good lesson in not overhyping new releases - XP didn't take off that quickly, with businesses upgrading when they needed it, rather than buying XP because it had been released. I'm sure the same will happen with Vista, too.

Motorists who use satellite navigation are to be offered cheaper car insurance by the RAC. Apparently those who regularly use sat-nav are safer drivers, according to the motoring organisation.

"It means you don't have to constantly look at road names, warning signs and so on," the RAC said in an article on VNUNet.

Let me get this right. If you don't look which way you're going, and you ignore warning signs, preferring to stare deeply into a minute device on your car's dashboard, you're less likely to crash?

Get real. What will we have next? Cheaper insurance for people who use their mobile phone behind the wheel?

A commuters' journey is rarely exciting, but a small piece of technical thoughtlessness from the guard on the train this morning made a tedious journey rather more cheerful.

"Would any commuter who got on at the last station with a piece of equipment contact the guard," boomed a far too enthusiastic South West Trains' employee over the tannoy, waking half the train from their slumber.

Somewhat baffled by this generalisation, most travellers wondered if the guard was speaking to them.

"I've got a BlackBerry," the guard exclaimed. "If anyone can tell me the network or what it looks like, I'll gladly give it to you!," he promised.

Small, like a mobile email device, I would surmise, but not wanting to steal others' equipment I stayed put.

Quarter-of-an-hour later, the guard breezed through the train checking tickets. Intrigued by whether an act of thievery had taken place - or whether said device had been rightfully claimed by its owner - I asked the guard where the device was.

He still had it, he said, as he brushed past me on the way to check some more tickets.

"It's bizarre no-one's claimed it," I suggestively called after him. "There's a 1 in 3 chance you could guess the network."

Instantly a young woman, powerfully dressed and with a strong hint of City confidence, strode up to the Guard, wresting the device from him with just a few choice words.

I'm still none the wiser if the BlackBerry found its correct owner, but if you ever need a spare mobile device, South West trains seems to be the easiest place to pick one up.

One of the men most likely to eventually succeed Cisco's chief executive John Chambers has resigned.

Mike Volpi, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's routing and service provider group left the company late last week.

Commentators were unsure whether he had genuinely resigned, or whether he was pushed, but whichever one it was it throws the question of the successor to Chambers into some confusion.

It's unlikely that Chambers will leave yet-a-while, but losing Volpi, a well-respected man with 13 years behind him at Cisco, is a blow to the networking giant.

Volpi's departure is all the more surprising because he's told journalists that he doesn't yet have any plans for the future and he cites "personal reasons" for leaving: though he does say he's been mulling a resignation for "a few months".

The head of Linksys, Charlie Giancarlo, takes over his roles for the time being, and in some people's eyes becomes a frontrunner for Chambers' position, when it finally does become free.

It's difficult to know exactly how excited to get about open source networking projects. It's exciting 'cos its free (at least the software is, even if the support isn't). It's not so exciting because not many businesses have yet deployed it.

So should businesses be looking at open source networking? Probably, depending on their needs. I don't suppose there will be too many takers in the FTSE100, nor in the finance sector, due to reliability and security questions needing pretty firm answers.

But for smaller offices, there will surely be some takers. It's free and some of these solutions carry out most of the network features you need in a small business or branch office.

And in some ways, such devices are actually more secure than their proprietary counterparts. Just count on one hand (and you run out of fingers rather rapidly) how many times Cisco has reported IOS vulnerabilities, for instance. And who wants to hack into a little-used open source router?

Download numbers are small, but such solutions bear enormous potential. It just depends on the right software coming along.