Leadership By Numbers

This week I've been at Explore 2006, an IBM event for their Business Partners that specialize in training services. An awful lot of what I heard was under NDA, but it's all very , very encouraging. I was invited to make a presentation on business marketing with the tools of social networking: blogs and wikis.

The information was well received (I haven't read the evaluations, yet), and I kept the focus on the benefits of business marketing through blogging. A new job responsibility is emerging, "technical marketing," which bypasses the traditional channels of marketing distribution. Instead of trade journals, advertising, or even conferences, blogging encourages technical experts to directly share their insights to an appreciative audience. It's the disintermediation of customary marketing methods.

I made a special point to discuss the benefits of OpenNTF's open-source offerings in front of the entire , world-wide education channel, and to encourage the adoption of BlogSphere NTF. I also made a special point of using OpenOffice for the entire event, running on Ubuntu.

I have to tell you, that I'm truly amazed at how well Ubuntu auto-configured for my Thinkpad laptop. When it comes to Linux installations, laptops are usually the most difficult desktop deployments. Well, Ubuntu 6.06 was absolutely astonishingly straightforward. My ASUS wi-fi card was auto-recognized and configured, my Thinkpad pointer, the sound buttons--even the video output triggered through a bizarre key combination works without fail.

It looks like I'll be setting up a bank of laptops for the Nyumbani orphanage in Kenya, and, yes, they'll all be running Ubuntu.

So, maybe Antony Satyadas is right, maybe it is time to start thinking about Linux desktops.