What are some of pitfalls and concerns you need to have when assessing and integrating Instant Messaging ("IM" another biz acronym) with your business processes? Be aware you are sending clear text messages over public Internet - so all IM technology is inherently insecure. Privacy issues can also be raised - these messages are typically archived via IM servers of company whose services you are using and can be made public at a later date. Anyone with a network scanner may have access to and be reading your messages and if your are downloading files, you need to ensure your anti-virus software is setup to scan these files when you open them.

One of biggest pitfalls of technology and process is that it adds another communications layer to your busy day - but you can offset this by selecting or filtering who you communicate with at any point by using IM interface to block all or selected individuals from "seeing" you when you are online.

Finally, like all things in today's computer industry (or many) each of Instant Messaging vendors are trying to build applications which don't integrate with other (no surprise here - arrogance has not faded away in business community!). So, you need to assess installed base of market leaders and make a decision on which company's product you want to utilized - my recommendation would be to review Microsoft's or AOL/Time Warner's products - their installed bases are in 200 million users plus when combined (these numbers include consumer and business usage) and they both work well and have user interfaces that are intuitive.

There is one alternative company that is solving "IM Tower of Babel" issues and claims to integrate well with all proprietary apps by utilizing XML technology, Jabber, Inc., www.jabber.com So, if interoptability is important to you then I would recommend assessing their products.

Many people have stated they feel it was wrong (even evil) for a US ambassador to "lobby for Microsoft". Playing devil's advocate for a moment, let me ask following question: if an American citizen was having trouble in a foreign country would it be okay for an ambassador to help him or her out? What if an American company needed help in a foreign country? Is it okay then? Why would Microsoft be excluded? What is purpose of an ambassador? My understanding is these people exist to further goals and objectives of their country: including government, individuals and companies.

What is job of US government? To support it's citizens (a government has no other valid purpose). You could argue that supporting corporations directly or indirectly supports citizens.

Ambassadors do not exist to stop wars or make war talk. They exist to further goals of a government, and a government exists to further goals of majority of it's citizens. If I owned a company I would totally expect any US government organization to cooperate fully with my business, especially if by cooperating goals of my country were also furthered.

This bill seems to say that government wants to use open source for it's systems. This is perfectly fine as a government should use whatever software it feels is best fit for it's goals.

Open source is not a product, it describes an idealized way to develop and maintain a product. Most so called open source is worthless junk that most people would not dare put on their computers. By far great majority of this kind of code is never finished, poorly documented, virtually unmaintained and so full of bugs and security holes that it's laughable.

That being said, same is true, of course, of all other forms of software.

Now there are some great open-source products, and when people speak of open source they usually mean something like Apache, Linux, Unix, OpenOffice and hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of tools and utilities available. These are products that have given open source a good name.

However, I have never heard of open source accounting packages, SCADA systems (systems that control water, power and oil systems), factory control systems, military systems and so on. These things are either developed in house or purchased from a company.