Unmanned aircraft systems are becoming big business. It’s estimated the Department of Defense will spend as much as $80 billion on unmanned aircraft in the next 10 years.

Phyllis Johnson, vice president for research and development at the University of North Dakota, says Grand Forks is at the epicenter of a growth industry.

“I think this region is positioned as well as anybody, if not better than most,” said Johnson. “We have all the pieces right here to really grow this industry and take advantage of everything that’s out there.”

There was a lot of uncertainty in the area when the Department of Defense recommended realignment for the Grand Forks Air Force Base back in 2005. Thankfully, instead of seeing it close with the departure of the 319th Refueling Wing, a new mission developed around the emerging use of unmanned aerial vehicles. And while the RQ-4 Global Hawk isn’t scheduled to arrive until next year, it’s already having a positive impact on Grand Forks.

Just this afternoon, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held down the hallway from where I work in the Center For Innovation to celebrate the opening of Northrop Grumman’s new Grand Forks office. According to Minnesota Public Radio, they expect to have about 100 employees here within the next two years.

In addition, area educational institutions are getting involved, too. The University of North Dakota is now offering the world’s first degree in Bachelor degree in unmanned aircraft systems operations and Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls is preparing to train mechanics qualified to fix and maintain the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft.

Having this new industry in the region also presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Locating a supporting manufacturing or software in Grand Forks provides easy access to the United States Air Force, Northrop Grumman, and a variety of UAV training and educational resources. It’s possible that our little city could play a key role in this industry for well into the future.

Grand Forks owes a big thanks to North Dakota’s Congressional delegation and city officials for their years of hard work in making this opportunity possible. Between this and the potential for clean and renewable energy in the state, we’re positioning ourselves well for the future.

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1. High Turnout in Grand Forks Yesterday
2. Barack and Hillary Coming to Grand Forks
3. Britney in Grand Forks
4. Grand Forks Finally has High Speed Mobile Internet (EV-DO)!
5. I Just LOVE Grand Forks…

Update (8/26/2009): Via The Consumerist,  it appears that SIGG has created a voluntary exchange program (i.e., not a recall) which allows you to send in your old SIGG bottle in exchange for one with the new BPA-free EcoCare liner. All you have to pay is the postage to send it to them. For information on how to exchange your bottle, send an email to liners@mysigg.com.

Update 2 (9/1/2009): Via an email from SIGG, here is the direct link to their bottle replacement program.

I’m glad to see them respond so quickly and effectively. Bisphenol A is a chemical compond that is in almost all plastics we come into contact with on a daily basis. It is a synthetic hormone that acts as an endocrine disruptor:

… “hundreds of studies published in the decade” have found that laboratory animals exposed to low levels of it have elevated rates of diabetes, mammary and prostate cancers, decreased sperm count, reproductive problems, early puberty, obesity, and neurological problems. Some scientists believe that humans, especially infants, are currently exposed to levels that are known to cause harm in laboratory animals.

There are other chemical compounds used industrially that also act as endocrine disruptors (DDT, Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs), Phthalates), but because BPA is used in so many common products — including many we put in our mouths — it attracted special attention.

As Fast Company magazine chronicled in an in-depth article earlier this year, groups representing the chemical industry have done everything in their power to cover-up the effects of BPA on the human body and prevent government regulation. They are employing tactics used by the tobacco industry to introduce conflicting scientific data with the goal of creating confusion and doubt.

When the spotlight fell on BPA in early 2008, the safety of plastic water bottles and baby bottles came into question since they have direct and frequent contact with our mouths. Because the major bottle makers — particularly Nalgene — all used BPA to harden their products, SIGG and other metal bottle manufacturers were quickly offered up as safe alternatives.

The interior of SIGG bottles is lined with a plastic material to create a barrier between the water and the aluminum walls. When questions came up about BPA content in the lining, this is what SIGG CEO Steve Wasik told the TreeHugger.com blog:

Very thorough migration testing in laboratories around the world is conducted regularly and has consistently shown SIGG aluminum bottles to have no presence of lead, phthalates, Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), Bysphenol A (BPA), Bysphenol B (BPB) or any other chemicals which scientists have deemed as potentially harmful.

Fast-forward to last week, when the CEO issued a letter to customers on its website. Here’s a relevant section (emphasis is mine):

After two years of comprehensive testing and development and a one million dollar investment in new equipment for our Swiss factory, SIGG began producing bottles with our new, next generation “EcoCare” liner in August 2008. Providing the same quality and protection afforded by the previous liner, this new powder-based, co-polyester coating has been thoroughly tested and is certified to be 100% free of BPA, phthalates, BADGE, BFDGE, and NOGE. It is also environmentally friendly as its application generates virtually no waste and utilizes no organic solvents or VOCs.  Our new bottle liner is not only a technological advance; it’s a major step forward in SIGG’s journey towards sustainability. To be clear, all SIGG bottles made since August 2008 contain our new BPA free EcoCare liner. SIGG bottles manufactured prior to August 2008 have the former water-based epoxy liner which contains trace amounts of BPA. These bottles have been thoroughly tested and showed 0% leaching of BPA. It is easy to determine which liner you have, as they are of 2 distinctly different colors.

This is what the new and old SIGG bottle liners look like:

Understandably, SIGG customers are shocked and angry. The company gave the impression that its bottles were BPA-free thanks to some clever and deceptive language about BPA leaching. And there’s no question the deception was intentional. SIGG could have answered questions openly and honestly at anytime, but I suspect it didn’t want to threaten growth and profits after Nalgene refugees flocked to their product to get away from BPA.

Now that the company has finally fessed-up, its reputation is in question. Sure, it claims that all its bottles made in the last year are BPA-free, but are customers really going to trust anything coming from SIGG spokes people?

Casey and I have both been drinking from SIGG bottles for over a year and a half, so we both have ones with the old liner containing BPA. We feel duped, and I suspect we won’t be buying anything made by SIGG ever again. Casey already uses a BPA-free Nalgene bottle she received at BlogHer last month, and I’ve asked for a Klean Kanteen for my birthday coming up in a few weeks. This is a great opportunity for competitors, and if they’re smart, they’ll find unique ways to turn former-SIGG customers into their own via trade-in deals, etc.

It’s hard to say what last week’s events mean for SIGG in the long-term. Maybe the company will manage to rebuild customer trust and loyalty, or maybe it’s on a downward slope from here on out. In any case, it’s a cautionary example to all businesses that honesty and transparency are principles that businesses should not ignore.

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• Totally Wasted — Mother Jones’ epic special report on the War on Drugs. Damning evidence that our country needs a major shift in drug policies.
• The Great American Bubble Machine — Rolling Stone magazine takes on Goldman Sachs and shows how it turned the U.S. into its own personal pump-and-dump scam to create pure profits for already wealthy individuals. I still get angry just thinking about this one.
• How American Health Care Killed My Father — If you read only one article on the health care system, read this one. David Goldhill does a deep exploration of the health industry and shows why the current proposals for reform will serve to cement our broken system in place. Please — read this article.
• Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food — Time magazine’s take on the hidden costs of America’s cheap food is a great introduction to the topic. For further reading, I recommend Food Inc and Michael Pollan’s books.
• Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle — If you’re a fan of Fiji Water, you might not want to read this one. Because once you find out you’re supporting a military dictatorship, you probably won’t want to buy another bottle. Update: Via the comments, Fiji Water has issued a response to the Mother Jones article I linked to that is worth reading (as are the comments on that page).

Possibly related posts:

1. The Food-Health Care Link

What is happening is a combination of planning and luck that’s left the state with something rare these days: a $700 million budget surplus and a big fat tax cut. Its banks mostly avoided the subprime mess, and North Dakota worked to bring in more businesses like Microsoft. Then, prices went up quickly for the state’s traditional strengths — energy and agriculture.

So now with thousands of jobs available, North Dakota officials have been traveling out of state to try to fill them. Jerry Chavez heads a development corporation for the small city of Minot. Since the beginning of the year, his group has been making monthly visits to job fairs in hard-hit Midwestern communities.

You can listen to the whole story below.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

North Dakota’s unemployment rate for June 2009 was 4.2 percent — the lowest in the country. As of July, there were about 9,000 job openings throughout the state. Granted, many are retail and food service positions that don’t great pay or benefits, but there are plenty of good ones in government, manufacturing, and especially, energy.

It’s now clear that North Dakota’s slow-and-steady growth rate during The Bubble was a blessing in disguise. Combine that sustainable growth with growing demand for alternative energy (wind, ethanol) and commodities (oil, coal, natural gas, grain, etc.)  and I think North Dakota has the opportunity to emerge from this recession stronger than ever.

As for that $1.2 billion state budget surplus — let’s just not ask too many questions about where that came from…

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2. North Dakota: Another Step Backwards
3. Steve Jobs Still Hates North Dakota
4. Porkbusters — North Dakota’s Share
5. PeopleSoft Still Sucks

Short answer: Like everyone else, I have no idea.

Longer answer: Keep reading.

Death Spiral

Our nation’s economy is in a death spiral. The collapse of housing prices led to the credit crisis, which stalled business and consumer spending, which led to higher savings rates and hundreds of thousands of layoffs, which led to more foreclosures, which led to even lower house prices and even deeper problems for banks. Continue, ad infinitum.

Because everything in the economy is interconnected, as one area gets worse, it has a negative cascading effect on everything it touches. The two problems here are:

1. There is no end in sight (except for maybe zero)
2. Everything we’ve tried so far has failed to produce measurable results.

Not only do our economic problems feed on each other, they also strain and highlight weaknesses in other sectors of our system. Income and spending are down across the board, leading to lower federal and state tax revenues, while the dramatic drop in home prices is affecting schools and local governments depending on property taxes. Medical costs continue to soar, while hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their health insurance, which in turn puts a big financial strain on hospitals that typically bill less for patients paying out-of-pocket. And we can’t forget about the millions of Baby Boomers just about to hit retirement age and start collecting Social Security benefits, while there’s a good chance their private investments are worth a fraction of what they were just last year or that their pension plan is insolvent from making the same bad investments most other financial institutions got caught up in.

There’s No Going Back

There are two major things that would help to stop our downward economic spiral:

1. Get consumers to start spending again
2. Stop house prices from dropping further

Seems simple enough, right? Unfortunately, propping up either of these would be extremely shortsighted. Consumer debt and house prices were completely detached from reality for the last 10+ years, and attempting to return to that level of consumption and mania would be delusional. People now realize their wealth created with the “your house is an investment” mantra was completely imaginary, and now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction toward saving and frugality.

Zombie Banks

This leads directly into the banking crisis. Most banks are still holding onto their toxic assets, publicly stating that housing prices will rebound and that these troubled mortgages really won’t look so bad given enough time. Like I said above, this line of thinking is delusional. The thing is, I don’t really think banks expect prices to return to their peak-bubble levels anytime soon. They just don’t want to admit reality: They are insolvent.

If banks were required to mark down mortgages to actual market prices (which, according to some economists, still have a long way to go before bottoming out), they would realize huge loses. For nearly 1,000 banks it would mean that their liabilities overwhelm their combined assets and capital — the very definition of insolvent. This is why they are hoarding bail-out money and refusing to lend it.

Last weekend, This American Life teamed up with the guys from NPR’s Planet Money blog/podcast for another great show, titled Bad Bank. The episode provides one of the clearest explanations of the banking crisis that I’ve heard so far. Go ahead and give it a listen.

Note: This episode’s MP3 file is no longer linkable. You can listen to the episode on its archive page.

As they lay out in the episode, your approach to solving the banking problem depends on whether or not you believe housing prices are going to rebound. If you do, you’ll probably side with the banks and favor a “bad bank” program where the government and/or private investors buy-up toxic assets to get them off bank balance sheets. But if you’re like me and you don’t think housing prices are coming back anytime soon, you’re left with the option of nationalization.

Now let me be perfectly clear: I hate the idea of the government owning and operating our country’s largest banks. It runs counter to my philosophy as a business person and seems to undercut the capitalistic core of our nation. That said, WHO CARES. Yes, it’s big government. Yes, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It’s also what the United States has recommended to every other country facing a banking crisis and it seems to be the best way to get out of ours. Let’s not let our emotions get in the way of what we need to do.

Pessimism

The more I read and learn about the U.S. and global economies, the more pessimistic I become. It seems that most of our leaders don’t have the political stomach to do what needs to be done (I’m looking at you, Tim Geithner). And while the stimulus plan and other efforts are better than none at all and will be useful in the long run, I don’t think they’ll prevent our economy from eroding for several more years. Think “L-shaped” recovery, not “U” or “V” shaped.

Things get even more troubling when you look at the economies of countries around the globe. British and European banks are somehow in worse trouble than their American counterparts, developing countries are getting pounded by the global drop in demand for manufactured goods, and third world nations dependent on government aid are seeing it disappear as the first world licks its own wounds. There’s a lot of unrest out there, and the crumbling economy seems like a powder keg waiting to explode.

The Long View

As I said before, I expect it’ll be a few years before we return to economic growth. Once we’re on the other end, I can’t imagine things returning to how they were BEFORE the depression — they simply can’t. People are already spending less and saving more. More people will rent instead of buy, and those who do pay a mortgage will see their house for what it really is: shelter, not an investment.

And after the imaginary wealth of the financial industry completely evaporates, maybe we’ll get back to actually making things instead of building new ponzi schemes. This is the perfect time to create a new industry, and alternative energy would be a perfect fit.

This crisis would be a terrible thing to waste.

Additional Resources

• Frontline’s Inside the Meltdown
• The Crisis of Credit Visualized
• Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
• Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices
• The Axis of Upheaval
• How the Crash Will Reshape America
• How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?

Possibly related posts:

1. Staring Into The Economic Abyss
2. Feeding the Monster (or, The End)
3. About That Economic Stimulus Plan That’s About to be Passed…
4. What Are We Going To Do About It?

More and more, I’m beginning to think that our success as a nation — and as a species on this planet — depends on us looking back to our ancestors for wisdom and insight for survival. And, I think that will lead us to one overarching theme: Decentralization.

As the human race became more modern and industrialized, it optimized almost every for low cost by pursuing “economies of scale”. Which means, in a nutshell, that it makes more economical sense for a small number of large firms to produce something than for lots of small ones to pursue the same goal. The market seems to have this embedded as a form of Darwinian survival of the fittest — weak, poor performing companies fail, while the successful ones grow until there is either a natural monopoly or, more likely, an oligopoly.

You can observe this in practically every industry. It’s why we have Microsoft, the Big Three automakers, and Walmart. It’s also why we now have an infinite number of niches that monopolized by an infinite number of businesses. Anyone for high-end discount (Target), organic groceries (Whole Foods), or technology books with cute animals on their covers (O’Reilly Media)?

One of the problems with concentrating too much market power in the hands of a few companies is one we witnesses just a few months ago with American banks– the Too Big to Fail phenomenon. Which actually means, as we’ve seen, that these huge corporations are not so big that they can’t fail, but that they’re too big for us to let fail. Hindsight now tells us that we shouldn’t blindly trust the market leaders of any industry, be it banking, automotive, retail, food, or energy. In other words, no business should be too big to fail.

Other, different examples of the perils of centralized power can be seen in the energy and food industries. Sure, it costs less to produce both of these in a few big spots (power plants, feed lots, etc.), but it creates plenty of problems too. Fewer, bigger power plants increase the chances of a catastrophic outage that affects large numbers of people and larger feed lots, slaughterhouses, and food plants exponentially increase the chance that food-born disease is spread to lots of customers in a large geographic area.

Less obvious are the transportation costs. Moving large amounts of grain and livestock hundreds or thousands of miles isn’t cheap, nor is shipping back the processed meats, breakfast cereal, or produce. Same goes for electricity. More energy output is required to transport it over longer distances, since resistance gradually reduces the available power.

To me, this all points to a move back toward decentralization. More, smaller power plants closer to consumers — including at the building level itself with solar, wind, geothermal, cogeneration, and other power generation technologies. For food, it could mean the return of small farms that grow a variety of livestock and crops, a flourishing local market, and possibly a vegetable garden in everyone’s backyard. It could also mean the return of machine shops and a real manufacturing industry in the USA.

Decentralization isn’t necessarily the low cost way to organize a system, but what it lacks in monetary savings it makes up in flexibility and the ability to survive a catastrophic failure. Taking Google’s various services as an example, it hosts everything on multiple server farms, each containing hundreds or thousands of individual servers. One or a dozen servers can (and sometimes do) fail at any given time, but because their system is so widely distributed and redundant, it doesn’t matter. Failure is isolated, and the damage (if any) is limited.

So, in the future, we might need to start becoming generalists again out of necessity. The days of just accountant will be gone, replaced by accountant, farmer, energy producer, and more. In other words, the Maker/DIYer will be King.

Possibly related posts:

1. Power Hungry
2. Open Source Software and the Future of Business
3. The Freewatt: Distributed Power Generation
4. Amory Lovins: Improving Energy Efficiency
5. Amazon S3: Utility Computing in Practice

Update @12:30pm: I also recommend reading The New Trough by Naomi Klein on the Rolling Stone website.

The more time passes, and the more that I learn about America’s crumbling financial system, the more I think maybe we should just let it all burn. You know, start over from scratch.

Last month’s “rescue” plan — which I publicly supported given the dire circumstances — has done little to ease the credit markets because banks still aren’t lending to each other. Instead, the geniuses running these failing companies are using taxpayer money to merge with other troubled banks, give massive bonuses to executives who did nothing to deserve them, and fund hugely expensive executive “junkets” at exclusive resorts. The phrase “pissed off” doesn’t come close to describing how angry this makes me.

Via a Twitter post by Tim Bray, here’s your latest must read: The End of Wall Street’s Boom, by Michael Lewis. Michael, a Wall Street veteran of the excesses of the 1980’s, writes at length about a hedge fund manager named Steve Eisman — one of the few people who saw the anticipated the collapse of subprime mortgages and placed bets that their lenders would go bust.

Eisman’s revelations are both infuriating and depressing. The people running and working at the lenders and ratings agencies were some combination of naive, stupid, and evil. They created financial derivatives so complex (and backed up by almost zero assets) that nobody completely understood how they worked or their potential for disaster. They didn’t know what they were doing, but were so blinded by greed that it didn’t matter. And now everyone has to pay for it.

I believe a lot of people are to blame for our country’s current economic mess — gullible borrowers, greedy housing speculators, complaisant government officials. But none of these groups come anywhere close to Wall Street’s role. Fools or crooks, they are largely responsible.

Possibly related posts:

1. Cascading Failure

If there were any doubts, this week should confirm the fact that our country is in deep $#!&. We were (are?) closer to a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system than most people will ever realize, and that’s just one of a number of crises that are boiling up:

1. The root of the recent bailouts and bankruptcies, we’ve still got at least another year of the housing/mortgage mess before it bottoms out.
2. Our cheap and easy to extract supplies of oil are dwindling while worldwide demand is increasing, causing energy prices to reach to new heights.
3. The world’s food supply hasn’t kept up with its population growth, leading to record inflation in commodities such as corn and rice.
4. Health care costs in this country are out of control, and too many of our citizens aren’t getting the preventative care or catastrophic treatments they need.
5. We’re witnessing a slow-motion disaster with the Medicare and Social Security systems, which are respectively facing insolvency in 2019 and 2017 or 2040 (depending on who you ask).
6. The national debt is increasing at a rate of nearly $2 billion per year, with no reason to believe that trend is going to go down anytime soon.
7. The value of the U.S. dollar is near its all time low, which does increase U.S. exports but has exacerbated the rise in oil and other commodities.
8. Our students are being eclipsed in math and science by kids in many other countries, pointing to a bad future for science, technology, and engineering in this country.
9. Growth in real wages had been stagnant, and has recently become negative thanks in large part to inflation created by a number of items from above.
10. And to make the list an even 10, let’s thrown in the United States’ complete nonresponse to globalization — In particular, the rise of China and India .

So our country is facing all of the immediate and long-term problems listed above (along with some others), while our law and policy makers are twiddling their thumbs. Neither major party has done anything of substance to actually fix these problems. Instead, they’re engaging in every sort of short-term pandering opportunity that gives the appearance of progress (“drill, baby, drill!!”) while punting the fallout for some future generation to deal with.

Our people and our government are in debt, we’ve based our economy on a fossil fuel with a finite supply, we can’t take care of our most vulnerable citizens, and we’re soon going to be eclipsed as a world power by China. So, seriously, I’m asking: What are we going to do about it?

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1. Why Software Sucks
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3. How’s Your Chinese?
4. About That Economic Stimulus Plan That’s About to be Passed…

Next question — Have you ever used Windows Vista?

Let me say this upfront — When Vista launched in early 2007, it was a piece of crap. The hardware wasn’t ready, drivers for older devices were either poorly implemented or nonexistent, and it was slow and buggy as hell. The poor reviews for the OS upgrade were justified.

Enter Windows Vista Service Pack 1

A year later, this all changed when Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Vista, addressing nearly all of the outstanding complaints. Suddenly, Vista became a modern, secure, and good looking computing platform. Except nobody knew it.

Perception = Reality

At this point, consumers already had a set idea of what Vista was (garbage), while at the same time Apple was giving them a constant beating with the Mac/PC ads it ran as a part of their “switcher” campaign. And what did Microsoft do about it? Nothing.

Well, it might as well have been nothing. They launched a pathetic “Fact or Fiction” campaign that now appears to have disappeared from the Internet, but that was it for a long time. And so, perception became fact, and people clung to Windows XP (forgetting that it had it’s fair share of problems for the first couple of years after it launched).

Finally Fighting Back

Recently, Microsoft finally realized that the status quo wouldn’t change without some action on their part. So, they hired one of the hottest ad agencies in the country, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to try and change people’s minds.

We haven’t seen anything come of this new campaign yet, but Microsoft doesn’t appear to be waiting. They’ve recently launch a website The Mojave Experiment, where they show video of Vista haters experiencing a new Microsoft OS (codenamed Mojave) and overwhelmingly loving it, only to find out it was, in fact, Windows Vista.

Mojave has created a lot of talk in the tech sector of the web, much of it negative. People are saying it’s everything from trickery to bad science. In reality, it’s a marketing campaign. Microsoft hasn’t claimed this to be a scientific study or a controlled experiment, so holding it up to that standard seems a bit unrealistic.

I’m trying to be more pragmatic about technology and less of a fanboy in my old age, since everything has its pluses and minuses. So, I need to give Microsoft credit when they’ve earned it (their development platform) and call out Apple when they deserve it (the Mobile Me disaster).

So, what do you think of Vista?

Possibly related posts:

1. An Experiment in Lifestreaming
2. Prediction: You Won’t Be Using Windows In 10 Years
3. My Impressions on Windows 7
4. The Open Handset Alliance, or Why Open Standards are for Losers
5. Business and the Microsoft Platform

It’s All About the Platform

At its core, what Microsoft offers is a stable, modern development platform that companies can build on in order to solve their business problems. Sure, Windows is the familiar face that employees interact with on a daily basis, but it’s the core technologies and specialized software that really add business value. Here are a few that I consider to be of high importance.

Windows Server

The Windows Server line of operating system editions lays the foundation for almost every other Microsoft technology aimed at businesses. Windows Server 2008 — the latest version — is mature, stable, and secure, and shares very little with the Vista desktop OS besides the “Windows” brand name.

There are definitely cases where applications should be run on UNIX or Linux servers for maximum uptime and performance, but in the vast majority of situations Windows Server will be “good enough” — especially for smaller businesses who don’t have full-time system administrators or when applications can afford occasional downtime to apply security patches and updates. There are trade-offs to running on the Windows Server architecture, but Microsoft has been surprisingly responsive in addressing the weak areas, making Server more “Linux-ish” than ever. You can install Server Core.aspx) to get a bare-bones, command line-only version of Windows. You can use PowerShell to create powerful command line scripts to automate many administration tasks. You can also now use Hyper-V to virtualize and consolidate multiple servers on a single physical server machine, much like VMware’s ESX product.

My point is, Microsoft has removed most of the objections and points of criticism previously leveled against Windows Server by turning it into a first-class server operating system that is extremely capable and easy to manage.

Office

The Office suite of projects is Microsoft’s other cash cow (Windows being the other) that is used by almost every business and organization in the U.S. You’re probably very familiar with the Office family of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint (unfortunately), and some of the others (Access, Publisher, Project, Visio). These are the applications that many knowledge works spend their entire day working in.

Side note: Microsoft OneNote is one of the coolest and most underrated members of the Office family. I highly recommend taking a look at it if you haven’t already.

Active Directory

Active Directory provides a centralized database for managing a Windows-based network and all its components — servers, workstations, users, etc. Much of Microsoft’s software, along with many third party “enterprise” applications, integrate with Active Directory to allow employees to use a single username and password to gain access to the data they need.

SharePoint Services/Server

SharePoint has quietly become one of Microsoft’s most important products behind the business firewall. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a really easy way for employees to share documents and data with each other while maintaining something of a structure. We’re using this in-house for a few specific purposes, and I can confirm that it’s a quick and inexpensive way to get something off the ground.

Exchange

Exchange Server has become the de facto communication/messaging for a very large percentage of businesses. In traditional Microsoft “embrace and extend” fashion, Exchange offers lots of useful features above and beyond the published standards, but that only work within the Microsoft ecosystem.

SQL Server

SQL Server is Microsoft’s SQL database software that serves as the data back-end for many of company’s business products. We’ve built our own specialized application on top of SQL Server, so I use it on a daily basis and can confirm that it truly kicks ass. It may not be free like MySQL, but it’s way less expensive than Oracle. Besides, it’s practically a necessity if you’ve decided to live “The Microsoft Way”.

The .NET Framework

The .NET Framework is one of those things that is invisible to the average person but that’s a huge win for developers. I’m not even sure of everything that falls under the .NET family of technologies, but I know there’s a ton there, and it’s all for the purpose of helping programmers solve problems faster.

For example, take the problem of supporting computers or devices that require access to remote data, but that do not have reliable internet connections. Building a customized solution to this issue would be extremely complicated, time consuming, and expensive. With Sync Services for ADO.NET (in the latest version of the .NET Framework), Microsoft solved the problem, hiding most of the complexity and giving developers a consistent way of handling this.

There are Trade Offs

You make several trade offs when you decide to run your business on Microsoft technologies. The first is money for time. Microsoft products aren’t the most expensive out there, but they’re definitely not free like Linux and the other open source software available for download. But, that money gets you a set of tools that are well documented and well supported — a far cry from even some of the most popular open source projects.

Another obvious trade off is openness for convenience and features. Microsoft has been getting better about supporting open protocols and standards, but the risk of lock-in is still there. My gut says that this is going to become less and less of an issue over time though, as Microsoft opens up to remain competitive with everyone else.

The Pragmatic Choice for Most Businesses

From my experience, I most web-based start-ups choose to build on top of open source software because:

1. It’s cheap and/or free
2. They have more time than money

In our case, we didn’t have to bootstrap the company and we knew that we wanted to keep our core technologies in-house rather than outsourcing them to a third party. This, along with the fact that our key vendors only make their products for Windows, naturally lead us to the Microsoft ecosystem.

In the last two years we’ve built our own Smart Client application for our customers because they all use Windows and a lot of them live in rural areas where fast and reliable internet connections are just a fantasy. Building our program as a web app would certainly have been faster and cheaper for us, but it wouldn’t have been a good solution for our customers, and that’s really what’s most important.

Parting Words

Don’t get me wrong — it’s not all perfect over in Windows Land, but it’s a lot better than I imagined just a few short years ago. Microsoft truly is all about Developers, Developers, Developers, and it shows with things like MSDN, Visual Studio, and their developer blogs.

Soon, look for another blog post, where I take the exact opposite point of view from the perspective of someone doing freelance work and dabbling in a start-up.

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