airdesk blog

Why is IT so difficult?

A friend of mine, a very experienced and senior non-executive director, asked me why, in all the organisations he knows, IT is the area that causes the most difficulty. There are some common explanations, but I am not sure they add up. This leads me to a different explanation, with some interesting consequences.

Versatile Desktop™ through UEFI

Versatile Desktop is the ability to run different business desktops on the same client device. We can already do this easily through terminal services, but only if we are online, and without the full features of the client device such as enhanced graphics or audio.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) makes it easier than before to run different desktops locally, with the full features of the device. This post looks at how widespread and practical UEFI is as a means of achieving the Versatile Desktop.

Virtual or Versatile Desktop

There is a lot of industry talk about Virtual Desktops at the moment. This is the desktop OS running as a virtual machine on a server in the datacenter. It sounds like the solution to all those difficult desktop problems, but it is more like a niche within a niche. Much more interesting is the Versatile Desktop. The Versatile Desktop is a personal computing device that is able to run different desktops at different times.

Might have been different

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) invented one of the world's first and best search engines, AltaVista, in 1995. Altavista was designed to use the new Alpha 64-bit RISC processor.

Migrating applications to Windows 7

One of the biggest challenges when upgrading to Windows 7 is in testing and preparing applications. This blog puts together a few conclusions that might assist you in planning the work.